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CAT and multipart animation

S

Stranger

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120
Hello Arno,

I'm trying to achieve a conditional animation of 6 section hangar sliding gate. Original animation works fine, but after tweaking it using CAT I get strange results. When using bounding box as a condition, gate disintegrates to huge polygons sticking around. When using a “distance to a reference point”, gate just disappears after an estimated playback time or appears after same period if I move aircraft away from it. I’ve made a test with simple 2 section gate animation using exactly same parameters in GMax and CAT. It worked just fine. Can you please take a look on original and modified asm files? Hope you are able to find a reason for such a behavior. I'm using a 2004 gamepack.

Thank you
 

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OK, I will take a look at your files and let you know if I find anything.
 
Hi,

I have been looking at the code, but I can't spot the error yet. The code itself seems OK. I also tried to use a different trigger (NAV2), but that had the same effect.

You haven't used the secondairy conditions have you? If they are not entered correctly you could get effects like this. But I could not see that in the source code.

Can you maybe send me the GMax file of your test as well? Maybe that can tell me more.
 
Hi Arno,

No, there is no any other condition except of animation trigger defined.

I suspect that the problem lies in gate window polygons which have another material ID assigned. I've figured out that the animation and triangles drawing commands are sorted by material. That was the reason why I had to export gate as separate object rather than a complete hagar. Hangar also has windows and when exported together with gate, hangar windows were moved from their place and rotated. Moreover they were animated together with gate, independent of their attachment to hangar. Static non-animated version had no such artefacts. Exporting hangar and gate separately solved the problem for regular untweaked animation, but after condition trigger addition I've got new problem described earlier. So it looks like correct part animation order or transform matrixes are destroyed by CAT.

I'll send you GMax files of both gate and test at the morning. They are out of reach right now.

Thank you for your help and time devotion.
 
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Hi Arno,

Here are GMax sources of hangar and test animation. Please select 6 sections of sliding gate and export them separately using "Export Selected" menu item. Let me know if you need textures as well.

Thanks
 

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Hi,

I don't think it is the same problem. But I am going to look at your GMax file this evening, so hopefully I can tell afterwards.
 
Hi,

You might have told us that you are using transparant materials :). They do not go that well together with animations.

The tweaks I talked about in the other thread are to make a static transparant part work with an animation, but in your file it seems to me that the transparant parts are also animated. In that case the tweak will not work. I think the only solution here is not to use transparancy and animations on the same object.

Btw, in the GMax file I could not very clearly see where the transparant parts are (although I saw them in FS). Where have you use them in the hangar?
 
Hi Arno,

Huh, I wasn't aware of a transparent material issue. Sorry I haven't mentioned it. :banghead:

The transparent material is used for windows glass in both hangar and gate. It is assigned to planes located between exterior and interior walls. They can be seen in GMax in wireframe view mode, otherwise you'll need textures and opacity map.

So I understand that there is no direct solution in my case. Well, I'll try to think of some workaround. If it is possible I'm still interested to learn about "static transparant part with an animation" tweak.

Thank you for your help Arno.
 
Stranger said:
Well, I'll try to think of some workaround. If it is possible I'm still interested to learn about "static transparant part with an animation" tweak.
Click to expand...

To say it simple all you have to do is to cut and paste the code of the transparant polygons before the animations. By default MakeMDL puts them at the end, but then the translation matrix of the animation is still active. So they need to be before the animations.
 
Glad to inform you all that problem is solved by splitting of original object into 3 parts: static hangar, animated gates and animated windows :D Now everything works as planned. Thanks for tips.

Arno, may I suggest a small improvement to a CAT tool? As the end of forward and reverse animations is detected few frames earlier because of possible frames skip at lower FPS (as you explained in tutorial), the final movement is usually abrupt and unnatural. I’d suggest adding of additional 3-4 frames after the end of animation without actual movement, so the detection will occur when movement is already finished. What do you think?
 
Stranger said:
Arno, may I suggest a small improvement to a CAT tool? As the end of forward and reverse animations is detected few frames earlier because of possible frames skip at lower FPS (as you explained in tutorial), the final movement is usually abrupt and unnatural. I’d suggest adding of additional 3-4 frames after the end of animation without actual movement, so the detection will occur when movement is already finished. What do you think?
Click to expand...

You can already do that in GMax at the moment of course, just don't use the first and last frames when you make your animation :).

But it is a good idea to see if this can be done automatically in the next version.
 
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