walking animations

#1 I am using run in place animations and they work fine when exported to Torque.

I don't know what modeling software you are using, or even if it matters, but I did find that in Milkshape the keyframes you need to specify for the various material/motions was always a bit off from what I expected. If I didn't take this into account on the export, I would get very odd results in-game. So, I'm taking a stab in the dark here to see if this might be what you are observing as well.

For example, I have a root animation from frame 1-90. Right after this I have a run animation from 91-130 (yeah, I know, they are much longer than needed but I'm still experimenting). What I found was if I exported frames 91-130, my character would move forward, but the animation would only play very sporadically. Once I switched to animate from frame 92-130, it worked perfectly.

I found the same to hold true with all remaining sequences from Milkshape. I always had to offset the beginning of the sequence by 1 or the animations would not work.

#2 It is animated in Max, 4.2 with a biped structure. There is something in the Max Documentation about ground transforms that might be specific for this exporter. anyway I think redoing the motions will work:-)

#3 Its a bit late for me and I am a bit drugged up on cold medication so I hope that this post makes some sense to people :)

You need to have the forward movement with your forward walk or run sequence, from what I am remembering the engine uses this movement to calculate how fast and far your player will actually move in the game (as well as physic stuff I believe). So it is somewhat important to have the correct tranform motion happening.

If you want to keep a static position for your character then you are going to have to tweak with the engine code to fix this problem, otherwise add a small bit of movement.

Logan

#4 Not sure if there have been any code changes latley, but the way it used to work was that the ground transform was used to determine what type of movement sequence to use.

On Trophy Hunting, the animals would transition from a walk to a run to a bounding state based on the forward velocity of the animal. It was an automatic behavior (which ended up giving me fits as I had to fine tune the duration of the sequences in order to get them looking right)

If in Max, just give it some forward movement. If animated in place, just link the character and the bounding box to a dummy and animate it moving forward.

Also, it would be good if you were more descriptive regarding the 'craziness' of the crazy results. If I knew the specifics of the craziness, I might be able to identify some other problem that I have seen before (most have simple solutions).

#5 well the forward movement was it alright. Oncece I let the model move I exported w/o any complication. Let this be a lessson in Max never animate walking in place :-)