Animation Woes ( again! )

[Bwian]

'Oh ...no .... not him again' I hear you cry...but I a in aminority of people atually doing things with the tools GOM and KE have made, so it seems.

Here is the deal:

I am making a unit which I need to have move without bobbing up and down. Now...clearly, that rules out pretty much all the stock animations, since they are geared to natural walking. This is not....
Since I do not want the unit to be able to push rams or climb ladders, I have based it on the Camel.

Easy...just make some new animation routines.

Yes...that's exactly what I did.

One problem. The animation routine was 'animerged', opened up in MS3D, had all the keyframes removed so I could re-do the animation.... and it now does not move at all. I changed the idle/walk/run anims... and the things just seem to screw up.

I have either had models that vanish when the animtions kick in, or models that just refuse to move! None of the animations I am making are actually making hte game crash..... but they just don't seem to work.

[KnightErrant]

Hi Bwian!

Even though I've sorta dropped out to do yard and plumbing stuff for
what seems an endless time into the future, I still pay attention. Is
this a problem just in-game or is it showing up in Milkshape? If it shows
up in Milkshape then I think it is a animationutilities problem and I can
take a whack at it.

Memory fades but the .cas format lets you change relative rotations to
make limbs move and also lets you program bone_pelvis to move the whole
thing forward. From what you've described that is what isn't working.
What happens when you try to make new animations in Milkshape or are you
doing it in 3dsmax and they don't come over correctly?

Silly me, I thought animations was a slam dunk compared to the mesh
format but this has more odd interactions than I ever would have thought.
Will check back Sunday night. Hmmmm, John Stuart Mill could drink... sorry,
mind wandered for a moment.

KE

[Bwian]

Of his own free will, on half a pint of shandy got particularly ill ( and so on! )

Animation file seemed fine in MS3D after I had modded it. I have tried animating in Max and converting over using the SMD format, but I was having other issues there, so I switched back to MS3D to eliminate one huge unknown in the process there.

After I convert it over to cas, it still looked OK as far as the text file etc. and no crashes or hiccups were evident. It did not crash when the animation pack was rebult, so it was clearly findin the animation OK. Also, the game loaded up and the unit using hte animation appeared in game perfectly until the actual animation was called for use. Then the unit was either vanishing ... or was just refusing to move at all.

Probably the best way to progress this would be for you to try and duplicate what I was doing. Basically, I wanted to remove the 'up and down' bobbing on all the camel animations, so I can assign a model to this skeleton and have it move without the 'bobbing'. The intended unit would be a 'Tomb Swarm' set of insect models. Once I have this working, I plan to break it up into sections, rig it to the feet, and make the sections ripple up and down.

[KnightErrant]

Hi Bwian,

Here's a question brought on by the sun baking my brain this Sunday.
When you make an animation in Milkshape and then export it out to
a .cas file, have you ever run the castotxt converter? The reason I'm
asking is that I am wondering if Milkshape is doing the animations by
MOVING the joints rather that ROTATING the joints. Remember how
important it was when you rigged the skeletons that you hit the
zero joints tab? Is this the opposite problem where the animations
are going into Milkshape's position info which the CAs format is ignoring?

My admittedly bad guess would be to do a castotxt conversion on one
of your animiation files and see what the top section looks like. If the
frames (which should have seven floats, 4 for quats and then 3 for
Milkshape Euler angles in degrees) all look like 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
then there is no rotatiion info in the file. A long shot for sure, but this
could be a quick check just to see.

Doesn't require much to check. doesn't even have to be put back in
game. Just take a look with a text editor and see what the stuff after
the header looks like.

Still keeping up as best I can,

KE

[Bwian]

Will check this when I get home from work tonight. I am assuming that the last 3 numbers should show some form of number for the rotation...

If that IS the answer, then I shall crack open my last bottle of Melbourne Old and Yellow to celebrate. This is a fine fighting wine, one not for drinking...but for laying down.... and avoiding.

Not just philosphers here...but Australian Table Wines as well