Collada Maya animation export

#1 This bit of documentation bothers me:

Quote:7. <animation_clip> Torque

This extension is defined by the COLLADA loader itself and is not yet supported by any DCC applications. It allows Torque-specific settings to be specified for an animation sequence (called a clip in COLLADA ).

If I'm understanding thsi correctly, it means that we can import animation_clips but there's no exporter out there that can generate them. Should we just be using Maya2DTS until someone creates an exporter for us? What's the point of being able to have animations in collada format if there's no one out there that can export them in torque-usable format?

#2 Hi Andy,

That part of the documentation is a bit out-of-date now; using the Torque extension was a temporary workaround for the problem that most 3D apps don't make use of the COLLADA animation_clip element, and so all animations would appear in a single sequence.

There are now 2 different ways to solve the problem, both using a TSShapeConstructor object:

1. Export individual animation sequences to separate DAE files, then combine them into a shape using TSShapeConstructor just like with DSQs. eg.

singleton TSShapeConstructor(MyShape)
{
   baseShape = "myShape.dae";
   sequence = "run.dae run";
   sequence = "walk.dae walk";
};

2. Export all animations to a single DAE file, then use TSShapeConstructor to split them up after loading. eg.

singleton TSShapeConstructor(MyShape)
{
   baseShape = "myShape.dae";
}

function MyShape::onLoad(%this)
{
   // add 'run' and 'walk' sequences from slices of the global
   // 'ambient' sequence.
   %this.addSequence("ambient", "run", 0, 20);
   %this.addSequence("ambient", "walk", 31, 43);
}

#3 THanks Chris! I'll give it a shot.

#4 Chris is helping me update these docs for Beta 3, so the artist section will be getting a little more love this time around.

<3 devs that write docs.

#5 Hi guys- Thanks again for the responses. The thing that's currently confusing me is the issue I have in this thread:
www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/94727
There's really no good way of deleting splines/indirect controllers in maya since the animation data is all parented to them. Yet Torque crashes when you try to import that stuff.

I'm just wondering if anyone has started using the dae animation stuff seriously yet. I'm certainly no Maya guru, but it seems to me that with this restriction on the dae import, we're going to have to go back to using the legacy dts export/import process (which works fine with indirect controllers).