Animations question

[Inferno388]

hey guys, i havent actually modelled or done any animations before but i was just curious.
i got blender recently to try it out and everything and this question came to mind:
just how complicated can u go with the animations in bz2? that includes animations for buildings and the units themselves.

i was just wondering cos with the new patch increasing the poly count to 20k, high poly units and buildings would look a little silly with simple animations haha  

[VSMIT]

How complicated you get is up to you.  Just remember that vertex animation (Bone animation) is not easy to do, since you'll have to basically do an animation for every moved vertex.  Moving/rotating an object is simple to do, just set keyframes for each movement, and remember that BZ2 will go straight from keyframe to keyframe.

Sorry if my explanation sucks.

[TheJamsh]

Remember however that collision meshes cant be animated, so no matter how complex your animation, it will still use the initial collision mesh even when playing a complex animation.

You CAN however update the collision mesh at the end of the animation apparently, but ive never seen this used... and wouldn't know how to do it.

[mrtwosheds]

Many of the little tricks mentioned around here are performed by dll, and mostly they are restricted to single player missions, as completely rewriting the strat, dm and mpi dll,s just to make one or more gizmo go pop in a spectacular way is often not a sensible way to do things.

Buildings use deploy (once only) and loop animations, loop animations are better if they are simple. Deploy animations can be as complex as you can be bothered to make them. They are hard to do well.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Just remember to preview another (animation) post where another user did an animation with Blender. Initially, the animation wouldn't run using OM's XSI exporter. The problem can be corrected with some Notepad editing of some numerical entries in the model file that BZII doesn't recognize; the tread pretty much covers what needs to be edited/changed to get the animation working for the game.

Using animations don't look all that complicated to do as I've started doing some with another modeler called Truespace, but the problems seem to appear when converting the original animation to a model format that BZII can read.

I wonder if OM has read the above post? Sure would be nice to make changes to his exporter to get in running properly, but like the rest of us only has so much time to do stuff. Still, Blender 3d looks like the best overall option for getting animated stuff into the game. Personally, I think of Blender as more of a BZII XSI conversion utility rather then a primary modeller due to it's somewhat obscure user interface. 

[Nielk1]

You CAN however update the collision mesh at the end of the animation apparently, but ive never seen this used... and wouldn't know how to do it.

By changing the object by DLL

[TheJamsh]

lol typical you... getting my hopes up that BZ2 did it on its own

[Dianoga4]

I think I might have to test OM's exporter to see if I can get the animations to work. I hadn't tried it yet because I still can't even get a UV mapped object to show up properly but I might try animations for the fun of it......if they work.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

As far as I know Blender can indeed do animations as another modeler made some type of air unit with wings that animate, but as mentioned in the other tread; OM's exporter needs some tweaking to match the scale and animation numbers right for BZII. MTS, pointed this out in the same tread. Hence the need to edit the XSI in Notepad to change a few numbers to get animations working properly.

I've been working on texturing lately, but I seem to have figured out enough to skin a few ships with some simple animations for importation into Blender via the 3ds format out of TS, and eventual conversion to XSI via OM's exporter. Getting a texture on a model in TS is a piece of cake compared to Blender from what I've read in other posts and treads; the UV editing tools in TS are fairly easy to use. I even figured out a simple method to seperate overlapping UV lines just by moving the bounding box that TS uses to the edge of the model. I painted a simple skin for the scout model in my TS tutorial in another tread. 

[Dianoga4]

Actually UV mapping in Blender is really not that hard really. I myself usually layout my uv maps myself instead of just using the unwrapper that it has. I like having more control that way. I layout the uv map how I want and then use the "Save UV Face Layout" script which is built into Blender.

Blender indeed can do animations, I've animated things before with it. What I was referring to was trying to see if I could get animations working with OMs exporter because from a couple of other threads I read, it doesn't sound like anyone has tried. If there is a thread where someone has tried, please post a link, it will help thanks.

[Inferno388]

cool cool thanks for the help guys, although im just gonna start trying to make some simple models wen i get the time, having no 3d experience yet haha. i still have to get used to the blender interface as well haha, i cant afford any other 3d modelling programs at the moment so i got excited wen i found out about blender

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Try viewing the posts of the user gegc he posted this originally.