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Adding a bounds box----and animating it?

by David McDonald · in Artist Corner · 04/27/2010 (5:22 pm) · 3 replies

Hi folks. Heading back to Blender to test some things out and I have a little bit of confusion.

When animating I understand I need a bounds box not attached to any particular thing and that I must move that in my action to provide the ground transform.

1. Should this be parented to anything? If I just add a mesh and call it bounds then the cube gets exported.
2. This may be obvious to some but I'm a bit stupid at times. How do I animate (move) the bounds box as part of an action when I have selected my armature in pose mode? The bounds box isn't part of the action that I can see?

Thanks for being patient here. I realise these are some basic modelling things but I am pulling my hair out to find the steps i need ;-) (Andthe tuts out there skip over characters)

Regards
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Associate Steve Acaster
[YorkshireRifles.com]
#1
04/27/2010 (5:50 pm)
1. No, just leave it unparent, as a stand-alone mesh object called bounds.

2. I was always told make it large enough to fit you animations into ... however ... the actually character bounding box in T3D is specified in T3D unit space (in art/.../player.cs). 1 unit is half the bounding box, 2 are full - with the size being from the size of your player model in it's rest pose (which you can't export out in).

Your animations should really all be "running on the spot" anims. If you wanted an animation that actually moves your character in blender space, you'd have to alter code to move your player's position with the animation and then update the final position, possibly with disabling collision (which is how the older Call of Duty's did it when AI players jumped through windows etc - before full ragdoll and physics locomotion).

David McDonald
Bad Uncle Games
#2
04/27/2010 (6:11 pm)
Thanks Steve.
I have exported my character running on the spot without a bounds box at all and it seems to actually work fine (Speed adjusted in the player datablock maxspeed setting). It's a tricky process getting the animation and speed synced to avoid the moonwalk issue hence my question on the bounds box.

The latest exporter doesn't seem to ask for a bounds in the model and no errors are generated (Possibly bounds is autogenerated as it shows in the heirachy in Showtool pro).
Though the website for the exporter (0.97 version) makes reference to a bounds for ground transfoms so I was a tad confused.

Associate Steve Acaster
[YorkshireRifles.com]
#3
04/28/2010 (3:52 am)
You need ground transforms for death animations or it's likely to crash when it tries to align itself to the ground and then finds that it can't reference anything in relative position.

I'm using an older exporter so ... I'm not sure if you still need ski# nodes or not.