Any Milkshape animators out there?

This is driving me steadily insane, and there must be a better way!

When I was using Max for animating ( RTW ) it was a sinple process to manually key in numbers to translate the root bone as an animation progressed. You could also manually enter the absolute rotations to keep things nice and even.

In Milkshape, I can't find a way to do this! Both move and rotate values you enter are relative. Enter '1' in the move, and it moves you '1'. Not moves you TO '1'.

When you want to zero a particular rotation, you can't do it that way. You can only delete the key.

Even more annoying is when you want to remove a particular element of the animation. For example...I want to remove the up and down translation on the root bone...but NOT the forward motion. You have to delete all the keys and start again.

I also cannot see how you get it to actually display it's current rotation and translation values. All you have is a box to type in the values...and no box to display WHERE YOU ARE NOW!

IS it really this poor at animation, or is there something I am really missing? The manual is no help on this.

i havn't tried doing animations in milkshape yet, and you've just discouraged me from trying :laugh4: my initial idea to bypass animation-making in milkshape is this:
Do the animation in 3dsmax. open up lithunwrap 1.3 (thats the unwrapping program i uses for my models it can convert 3dsmax to milkshape files). open up the animation 3dsmax file and then immediately save it as a ms3d file. that way you uses lithUnwrap to get a 3dsmax animation from 3dsmax to milkshape.

i got no experience with animations and i havn't tried the above suggestion, so maybe it's just useless nonsense :dizzy2:

Uuuuhm there is a combo box with "relative", "absolute", "center of group" and "center of joint" options in the move tool so if you set that to absolute you should be fine.
The same goes for the rotate tool where you have "global" and "local" to choose from for the reference (I think global is the origin and local is the point where you click or something)