no you can't use bump. and by extension, normalmaps in jka, which sucks. what i meant though, is that by colouring the high resolution mesh, you can then bake out an almost perfectly realistic texture, it's annoyingly difficult though, so i dunno if i can be bothered with the effort.

but UT3 is where it's currently headed =]

XP Makes sense, JKA sucks too much to do it...I get it now!

Well I'm donne having to stand errors and more errors on carcass tryng to pull this out... that's why they're all behind me now ;)

only has a simple wave head animation with bad weighting (notice chin and wings), but that was really only to make sure the skeleton is on it's correct position and the gla file works fine, in other words, it works, from now on it's really only adding the rest of the bones and IK solvers (or however you call them on XSI), making the animation set, tags, shaders, gfx, sab files... etc... important is, there's probably nothing to stop me anymore ;)

meanwhile leave ya people with a pretty rendered wallpaper 100% 3dsmax (if anyone'd be interested ;P )

Wow... that's awesome o_O

BRAVO Manganiac!!! You truly are a rocket scientist...its official!!! Congrats on getting it to work...I'd love to see how you managed to figure that out, because after you sent me that pic, I was totally scratching my head on where the issue was. I hope I was at least somewhat helpful in your quest for sanity :)

eh... I can't take that much credit for myself, cuz the answers to my errors have pretty much allways been in front of me, I'm the one who took long to realize it...

the "1/2/3 frames only erro" happens on max when you dont have a segment of time with more than ~5 frames, on XSI, it happens when you don't have more than 5 KEY-frames, (so even if you set a keyframe on frame 0, and another on frame 100, you'll still get the 1~2~3 frame error).

the "cubic scale keys" on XSI had NOTHING to do with inches nor dots (windows regional settings) as it does on 3ds, it's actually related to how XSI interpolates the animation cuz, Today's modeling programs interpolate keyframes with some ease in motion, wich means, if you move a object from point A, to B and then C, by default (can be changed), it doesn' do it in straight lines, but in a curve (or spline) that crosses these points. If you remember schools' geometry, that's a cubic function, so to correct that while exporting there will be an option related to animation, check "plot" then in interpolation (it'll be set to spline), change to constant or line.
(took me a while to realize it... ;P "scale keys"<=>"key-frames", duh?!?! (keyframes is pretty much the only thing that has "key" on it's name on any modelling software))

and error 4599 looks like it's related to any stacks in wrong orders, by deleting objects from the scene I ended up isolating the bones, so after all, I deleted them and redid it, (I probably set freeze on my bones at some point while tryng to get rid of cubc scale keys).

EDIT.:if you think about it, it's mostly related to how old JKA is (cuz it was really just a mather of setting the xsi file to a more primitive configuration), wich was kind of susprising to me on how much easy-going XSI/mod tools is, it's almost like it's set to gaming exporting by default xD.

Good job!! :), so now you're gonna animate it from XSI mod tools??

That's what I keep trying to tell people :). If you look at the web page for XSI, it pretty much IS designed for games. It looks like a bunch of gobbledygook when you you first open it, but once you get the hang of it, its actually quite powerful (especially 6, being able to export 64K polys).

Turn to the XSI side, Manganiac...it is your destiny!! :D

yep, couldn't be any other way, max 7 doesn't have the apropriate exporter, so the model reaches the game as a junk of polies, plus even if it did export fine I'll be doing a lot of tests very often every time I change something on the animation and max's xsi exporter takes around 7 minutes to export this model with all it's bones and 330 frames (add ~2k frames and it becomes unpractical), while XSI takes around 1 minute to do the same, I should have seen this coming tho, frames improved a lot this export time... (carcass is still as quick as to any model, it's really only the exporting to xsi file thats taking me long)

YEEEeeeaaaaaaaah! *jumps* xD

can't help it, I really dream of been into game developing, allways knew XSI was the main tool for that, plus I'm already way too found of it, hard to explain, feels more cozy on XSI, may be the shortkeys).
I actually have to go back to modelling & uvmapping lessons on xsi ;P (skiped that xD), tho seens everything I did on max has an equivalent (already saw a pic of splines & cross-sections on XSI's help/turorials, to me that's the main thing, so it's all set :p )

(tho there's 0% chance I abandon max), there's a lot to mess around with it yet (I'm really found of all it's rendering side), makes so many pretty thigns ;3.

lol, i just left max 45 minutes ago, re-importing that (now...) nearly 6 million triangle mesh, and it only just finished...

at least i can rotate around it without lag, i'm anticipating having to hit render and go to sleep when i bake out the normalmaps lol.