Need help with Exporting New Animations

[Bwian]

OK...some progress has been made :D

By running the 'update' batch file, it seems to add in some animations that the initial adding had missed. This has cured my problems with the game locking up, and it appears that my animations are now being used. If I had made some changes and then updated the thing with the batch file, I would not have had this trouble :D

There is still a problem though...

I scaled up the imported mesh by a factor of about 2,I selected EVERYTHING in the file, mesh, skeleton, etc. and applied the uniform scale. Then I exported this to replace the barbarian standard bearer I was messing about with.

If I have got this correct.... the result should be a larger model... No

By scaling the skeleton in this way, I appear to have changed nothing. I know it was looking at my revised anim, since in the first go, I had inadvertantly moved the 'root' away from the origin, and this displaced the model to leave the standard bearer floating in space!

Do I need to move the pivot points or do something else here? My simple 'scale' approach is not doing the trick.

[Duke John]

Scaling the skeleton in the model is useless. You should scale all animations, or just 1 (idle for example) to try it out.

[Bwian]

Thats what I was trying to do....but I am a bit confused over exactly what is what here.

when I try to import just an animation, it gives me an error
'cannot import animation without the scene root bone'

It works OK, though, if I import the model first. This obviousely contains a skeleton for the animation to work on. I left the mesh alone, and tried moving each of the pivot points. I only worked on one single animation....the SG 01 Stand Idle.cas for simplicities sake...and to avoid doing lots of work for nothing ;)

So...with a model loaded, and an animation in Max ... what should I do next?

I tried:

1) Scaling the whole thing - mesh, skeleton...everything
2) Going into Hierarchy tab and trying to move the pivots ( affect pivot only ) and then moved all the pivot points
3) Moving in Hierarchy with 'affect Hierarchy' checked

Then I exported my animation to replace the one in the 'standard bearer new' folder. I verified that 'pack.dat' had changed. Finally..I re-ran the update batch file and tried it in game.

Rather frustratingly, every time I do this, I end up with a completely unchanged standard bearer! The only change I have been able to make was by accident! When I scaled the whole thing, I moved the root bone in the scene, and this lifted the model off the ground!

I am so close to cracking this.....but my lack of Max skill is showing ;) I haven't used it for animation very much, since I am mainly a mesh-modeller :D

[Bwian]

Tried something else....and that didn't work either :S

Tried importing the indvidual modified CAS animation files into the DAT file through animation editor, but that made no difference.

Duke John.... can you give me a quick rundown on exactly what you did to move the pivots around in the animation files? What I am doing in Max to shift pivots has worked before..and the animations play with the shifted skeletons in max...just don't show up changed in the game.

I will go back through the whole process tonjight to check for silly errors, etc. but so far, my attempts to actually change an original animation have met with no success.

Do I need to give my custom animation a unique name?

I have given the SKELETON a new name, but have simply been changing the animation in Max and exporting the animation only to overwrite the animation in the sub-folder containing my new skeletons CAS files. I wondered if the same animation was used multiple times, whether I was creating a duplicate animation name within the DAT file.

If I can just get this to work ONCE then I will be off and running