GameSpace: Weapons: Success

#1 Another thing you might want to consider doing is parenting some of the nodes and or objects to each other. This way you can animate the parent node or object and the children with also be animated with their parent.

For example say you wanted the gun barrel kick up and the gun to slide back as it fired. To do this you can create a group called rifle inside start01 and in that group you would put the lever, slider, nuzzlepoint, mountpoints, and everthing else you want to animate as a group. Then by animating the group called rifle all of the children in the group will get the animation of their parent. Aditionally you can still animate the children of the group seperately for things like the hammer and lever.

The group "rifle" will be exported as a node and all of the objects and nodes in the group rifle will be parented to the rifle node. You should also add the rifle node to the always export list in the .cfg file for you scene.

This allows you to make sure objects stay where they should in certain types of animation but still gives you control of the animation of each obejct if you need it.

#2 Thanks, Matt, I'm still learning the different ways to group objects for the export. For example; the weapon came to me with some of the weapon meshes with the start01 group and two others in a lower[child] group. I wasn't sure if it mattered where the pivot of the grouping was located as compared to each groupChild's pivot. At a certain point, I wanted to rotate the whole object and only the weapon mesh portion followed...then I did some regrouping/reselecting...because my Nodes were still in the groupParent and didn't end up moving with the weapon itself, ie my muzzle point and ejectpoint were static, which didn't seem right. Then it dawned upon me the need for grabbing the proper groupParent to move all my intended objects and it's pivot. I'm glad you clarified this part for me, I was scratching my head and reading that part of the pdf over and over not picking up the gist, of the cfg portion outlining the above.

oh, btw, say I wanted to do the auto LOD? I understand it that I'm to put the special property parameters in the Object Notes for the highest level mesh...using the above image as example, I would put the data in each mesh2 object?, now what about the groupParent? If I'd put all my weapon meshes into say, the group name rifle and did a grouping of my Nodes into it's own grouping(nodes) parented to the rifle grouping; do I need to put special property data into the groupParent's notes[rifle]? Thanx, hope that made sense...lol.

#3 Groups end up as nodes, groups are not mesh objects and as such they cannot have LOD settings (auto or manual), only mesh objects can have LOD. A group in gameSpace or trueSpace is just a location in 3d space that effects all of the objects in the group. You can see this by clicking on the group name in the scene editor and then clicking the axes icon (axes are also called the center or pivot in other 3d apps) to make the axes for the group appear. You can also move the axes of the group to any location that you desire, the default is usually the center of all of the objects in the group.

For autoLOD to work you need to add autoLOD settings to each of the highest detail level meshes in your dts shape and also add detail level markers for each unique detail level you want to create.

Using the example above you would rename your first detail marker to a higher detail size like 128 (or what ever looks best to you) and then also change the names of your highest detail level meshes to reflect this change. Then you would add detail markers for each of the the detail levels you want to create using autoLOD. Finally in the object notes for each of the highest detail level meshes you will add the autoLOD generation properties that are listed in the docs for the exporter. (Which basically consist of how many LODs to create, the pixel size at which to display them and the % of poly reduction to apply for each detail level generated.)

Make sence?

#4 Yes, marker for every LOD generated by the special parameters in object notes. Not ever a grouping...that was a bit I didn't know. Got it all. You're the best, Matt.