27 replies to this topic

[Grim]

Hello,

I will take as example one of my creation, to make it easier to understand, though it concerns other ideas or projects.

I did a chariot and i want to animate it so the wheels rotate when it moves.

Now the chariot doesn't have skeleton, it's just a mesh plus some passengerbones. How can i make it animated?

Do i have to make a separate skeleton, refer to it in the inis and make anims accordingly?
Or is it possible to do it a different way? Just making the wheels rotate, and save the whole thing in the same file? And then how to refer to it in the ini?

The first solution seems the most logical, but if i can make it another way, why not...

Thank you.

[Kelso]

You can do an animation without a skeleton. All the RoR building buildup animations are done without skeletons. Just make the animation by going into animation mode and keyframing everything in. Only you'll be moving the meshes themselves instead of moving bones around. Then when you export, export as a Heirarchal Animated Model and set the number of frames accordingly. Then to refer to the animation ingame it will simply be

Animation = modelfilename.modefilename

Where modelfilename is whatever you saved your .w3d as. For example, romanhouse.w3d has the animation romanhouse.romanhouse in the ini code.

[Grim]

Ok Thank you very much Kelso.

So you can only have one animation then?

[Hostile]

You can have all the animations you want. Mupliple meshes moving around and than seprate files for each animation.

[Grim]

Hmmm, so each animation is another file, named differently?

I thought you had only one file name for you model and your animation, and no other file referring to your object.

So basicly, if i understand well, i can have for example one object "Object" i can give multiple animations using
Animation = object01.Object01
Animation = object02.Object02
Animation = Whatever.Watever

Is that right?

[Hostile]

Exactly.

Well your animation for moving willbe one file. Another for fighting, another for being scared.

You can have idle1 file so it does one thing, idle two so it does another.

That way a horde of units might be sitting idle but doing differant animations to make sure they are not clones.

Structures would have one animation for construction, another for upgrade and so on.

They are referenced in the art code in the object ini file.

[Grim]

Thank you very much.

Damn it feels so good when you know and can do new things ... and it works

[halbarad]

this is how pretty much all the building are animated and i also animate like this when i can

[Kelso]

It is actually much easier than trying to rig up a skeleton. There is no less amount of animating and you don't have the hassle of making the skeleton and making sure it exports right.

[Grim]

Yes i have experienced that, it's really easier. It even works on existing models, so you don't have to mess with the skeleton, names and everything, you just have to import the stuff, bind, animate and export the whole thing very easy.

If new people to animating is reading this topic, i advise you to try this method.

Thanks guys.

[Hostile]

Now that Grim has stomped us in INI coding, I can only imagine he'll now crush us with cool animations.

[Kelso]

Seriously Grim, you fucker.

[Celeglin]

Nuuuuuuu! He'll take over skinning next!! We're going to have to set up defences against Grim's ever expanding empire of awesomeness.

You're amazing, Grim. Keep it up!

[{IP}Gil-Galad]

Lets start a GRIM fanclub lol but yeah his mod kicks ass so much fun...

[Lavskaegge]

Grim are u saying that we should skip the bones for the units aswell? .. Well that sounds cool and not very difficult. ill try it out .


and yea u rule grim

[Grim]

Hehe calm down or i'm going to make a fight club and recruit you all.

For the anims, don't care, i've only done a dozen yet, and i'm learning the tool more than making kickass things, and i'm not excellent at artistic things. But being able to do models and anims is very interesting to me, until last month, i thought renx would never work with me, i've played with the code to reach my goals before, but the modeling opens many gates to creativity.

And anyway i'm a shit at skining, even if i try hard

@Lavskaegge: Be careful, i'm not saying bones are useless, i abuse of them now, but the method of saving a whole model+bones+anim to a file you refer to in your inis for the animations without referring to a skeleton, that is great.
I'm talking about getting rid of the skeleton shit, not the bones themselves.
The big advantage of rigging a skeleton and making your anims refer to it is that you can use your anims for other skins, by changing the original and bind to the skeleton.

[Shelob Riding Ringwraith]

if i may ask(no i didnt bother reading so many blocks of text )

can cinimatic units be animated that arent binded?

[ched]

cinematic units are just the same as normal units, so i guess it could work

[Torn]

There is a point in using skeletons though, so you can export just the animation w3d file for use with a single model w3d. And also for wwskinning and stuff.

Why wouldn't cinematic units be able to be animated that way? Anything can be animated that way, ched's right, they are the same as normal units so it will work.

[{IP}Gil-Galad]

Well not if they werent binded to a skeleton, but if they were then yes they shall work