XSI Animation Export Question
by Joshua Horns · in Artist Corner · 04/26/2009 (3:04 pm) · 2 replies
I have an XSI question I hope you all can address.
Once I create a particle emission from a surface and write it to cache, is it treated like an animation when I export it? If so, could someone detail the steps to export that into collada because I haven't been able to figure this one out.
Let me illustrate my question with an example (no pun intended... ok maybe a little one).
I create an emission from a grid surface and go to animation/tools/plot/write to geometry cache. At this point I should have what is basically an animation which is played back and not a simulation, right (of course I must load from cache to make this the case)? Am I able to then export that animation from XSI and use it in Torque via Collada?
This has been driving me batty for a few days now.
Once I create a particle emission from a surface and write it to cache, is it treated like an animation when I export it? If so, could someone detail the steps to export that into collada because I haven't been able to figure this one out.
Let me illustrate my question with an example (no pun intended... ok maybe a little one).
I create an emission from a grid surface and go to animation/tools/plot/write to geometry cache. At this point I should have what is basically an animation which is played back and not a simulation, right (of course I must load from cache to make this the case)? Am I able to then export that animation from XSI and use it in Torque via Collada?
This has been driving me batty for a few days now.
About the author
Associate Matt Summers
Dark Industries
I would almost have to see the particle effect to see what would need to be tweaked to get it to export. The main problem is that with particles much of the animation is on the material, and getting the animated material info from the format that it is in XSI to whats needed for DTS.
The one of the major issues is animated transparency. The XSI DTS exporter reads a custom property named "Vis" off objects at each frame of animation for each object. This value is a float between 0 and 1. 0 is fully transparent and 1 is fully opaque. You would need to either add this property manually to each object in the animation and then set its value according to the alpha value of the shader or you could automate it by adding the custom property and then driving the value of the vis property by linking the shader alpha value to the vis property. It would then update on its own automatically and be read properly by the exporter as visibility animation.
When working with the COLLADA pipeline, it would be a completely manual process at this point. Visibility animation is supported via extensions to COLLADA that have to be manually added to the COLLADA file. So if you needed animated visibility for your baked sim you would need to export your COLLADA file and then open it in a text editor and added the needed mark up to each animation frame in the COLLADA file. Doesn't sound very fun to me. :)
These are just some ideas to think about given that I have no idea what your particle sim is doing. If you send me a sample scene I will take a look at it and offer some advice on getting it from XSI into Torque.