GMax Animation following a path wont play

[fsintegral]

Hi
I made a sample animated box (poly) that follows a circle. The model exported well, but the box is not moving in FS :

Tick18_Main is the name of the box, and this is the only object I exported.

My aim is to attach a dummy object to that animated box so I can make an attached library move around the airport followin a defined path :
--Tick18_Main (small animated box following a path)
-----attachpt_dummy_library (attached dummy attachpoint with library GUID)

I did not exported the attachpoint, but the animation did'nt played at all.


Any Idea?

 

[LensHanger]

Did you create a bounding box for the animation?

You have to create a box that completely encloses the animation path.
For example :- you have a cube 1 meter on all sides . This moves 10m in the y direction then 10m in the x direction then 10m -y and 10 -x giving a 10x10m square path.
Now create a box a little bigger than the combined dimensions of the path and object eg. (10 +1 ) +( 1 to make sure!) x (10 +1 ) +( 1 to make sure!) x ( height of animation +1 ) . This equals a box 12 x 12 x 2meters enclosing the object at all points during the animation.

Now give the bounding box a standard plain coloured material and set the opacity to 0.
When you export the scene ( 1m cube + bounding box) the mdl compiler strips off all the material from the bounding box but keeps its dimensions for the visibility settings. Thus allowing the animation to be viewed at all points in the animation.

Hope this helps

Len

 

[ablitos]

The presence of a bounding box would not effect the animation of an object to work or not. Just to make sure, did you use keyframes in gmax to animte the object as simply naming it Tick18_main will not animate the object. If you want, you can send the gmax file to me..jen_n_dave1123@yahoo.com or post the file on here.

Dave

 

[fsintegral]

Hello again!

Thanks for all tips, I figured it out :

1) Making a box sightly larger than the whole animation area doesn't change things except that this helps very much in keeping the object visible wherever you are looking from

2) I had to convert the whole animation into keyframed animation (thanks very much ablitos). The path is okay, but MakeMdl needs keyframes to export the model properly.

3) When creating the attachpoint, you need to follow all the steps properly in order to make the attach work properly. having the object named "my_object" and the attachpoint named "attachpt_my_object" is the only way I found to get it okay (same name)

4) You must be sure that there is NO exclude of type ALLOBJECTS=True, LIBRARYOBJECTS=true or FS2000/2002 style exclude in the whole area of the animation in order to make the attached object to show! WHEREVER the exclude is, in your scenery, in scenery/world, in scenery/Addon Scenery... FS does not care. Any exclude=no animation!!!

SO!
No I can have circling buses, tractors, cars... but what about the limitation of the 55 seconds of the Tick18 animation..? A traffic jam at 03:00AM. In fact, the problem is that I have to make my car to rocket at 120Kts to fill the full path I want it to follow... Out of ideas..



Carl

 

[arno]

Hi Carl,

WHEREVER the exclude is, in your scenery, in scenery/world, in scenery/Addon Scenery... FS does not care. Any exclude=no animation!!!

This exclude should not influence the animation, but any attached objects is indeed affected by this exclude. This is a know problem of the attachpoints. So your animation is probably still working fine, only the object attached to it is not showing .

Now I can have circling buses, tractors, cars... but what about the limitation of the 55 seconds of the Tick18 animation..?

This is a limitation of MakeMDL. Some time ago I made a post about how to extend this limit, but it will require some ASM tweaking (no tool for that (yet) at the moment). I am still working on a proper tutorial about these longer animations, so for the moment it is probably only understandable for people who know a ASM format a bit.

Check this thread for more details:
http://www.scenerydesign.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2154

 

[lambda]

Somebody explain this long animatios method please i don't understand the changes in the ASM. I tried to educe but no result. I see that you trick with the keyframes but i dont understand

 

[arno]

As I said before, a tutorial on this is coming, but I am a bit limited on time for the moment. Of course tweaking your scenery like this, will always remain more difficult than using the default tools, so a little difficult it will always be .

 

[nickw]

Yes, poor Arno... we keep giving him lots of lists of tools and tutorials to write for free

 

[dianna78sg]

hi guys

sorry for bumping, I actually had a same problem as fsintegral...

I made an animation on main chassis of a truck named it tick18_chassis to follow a constrain path of a spline and all the wheels,load,stering etc are attached to it so they'll move along with it, but after export to the FS, the truck still look static. I then collapsed it to make few keyframes but still it didn't work..is there anything I missed here ?

I read on post #4 by fsintegral about converting animation into keyframed animation..I would like to know how it could be done ?

appreciate for any help from you guys