Skinned Meshes Disappearing

I'm having an issue with some skinned meshes in an oFusion scene.
Basically whats happening is as I move the camera around they pop in and out. They have animations on them and they play fine, but when viewed from different directions they just disappear.
There's a camera animating through the scene and 2 of the 3 animated characters aren't visible through the camera in the oFusion viewport and in the exported scene.

Any ideas anyone?

What the skeletal animation moves are the vertices, not the object, if the animation moves far from the starting point, then the object (node) bounding box wont be in the current frustum and the object wont be rendered

To solve this, if you have the Pro version, you can enable the "InPlace" mode to create a bounding box that will be updated correctly as the object moves

Or you can modify the AABB in your application when loading it to set a different AABB that wont be culled by the camera, probably with the totoal length of the animation movement, or an infinite AABB

I figured it would be a culling problem. The meshes don't move very far from their starting positions, but they don't start anywhere near zero world.
I'm mainly using the Community edition but the school bought us a Pro version. I won't be able to try the Pro export with in place mode until wednesday (the day we have to send our demo away for a competition, stress!).

I've just had a look at the mesh in Lexiviewer and it looks like the AABB is sitting on Zero world. Looks like resetting the AABB will be the best option.

Thanks for the help.
I'll let you know the results.


EDIT: Sorry but what would be the easiest way to do this. I'm spending all my time at the moment on getting the scene shaders working properly. Is there anyway of doing it through the material scripts?

If your character animation start is distant from the "Figure" or "Pose" mode position, move the pose mode position to the same as your animation start frame

Thanks!
I'll get our animator to sort that out tomorrow.

OK, so we have moved the figure mode over to where the animation happens, and have also tried exporting with "In place mode" on, and both of these didn't fix the problem. The AABB is still seen at the origin.

Any other suggestions or should I just get our programmers to set an infinite culling for this model?

Send me the scene file and i will take a look at it

Could you PM me your email address, I'm not quite sure how to attach it to a post here, and don't have any webspace access from class (restricted net access).

See the "Contacts" page for an email where you can send the file to

I've sent the email through

Just wondering whether you got my email or not as I haven't heard anything back.

The proper method to solve your issue is to move the biped "pose" location were the animation starts

But if you want a faster solution:

Select the animated object
Click in the hierarchy tab
Select "affect pivot only"
Set the position of the pivot at the correct location (were the animation is at the start, close to the foot of the object, when the animated object is sitting in that pole)
In the utilities tab, click on "Reset XForm" (and "Reset Selected" button)
In the modifiers tab, remove the xform modifier created in the previous post
Update the object in the preview viewport


Click for a bigger image

The AABB of the object will be at the correct location (the animation start)