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Maya2dts, animation and levels of detail

by Tao Ju · in Torque Game Engine · 11/03/2004 (8:42 pm) · 6 replies

Hi,
I am having problems exporting from maya 5 with both animations and levels of detail. The only way I can get the levels of detail to show up is to have the meshes parented under the start01 node. However, if I also want animations I have to have the skeleton structure under the start01 node, and if I have both then it creates a double image, one of a static mesh, and one animated. I tried telling the lower levels of detail to always export in my .cfg file, but it didn't seem to do anything.

I am using the seperate dts and dsq files, merged together in the .cs file as described on the maya2dts website. Can anyone tell my the proper setup to get both the animations and the levels of detail to export?

Thanks,
Cheryl
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Torque Owner Danny Ngan
#1
11/03/2004 (9:48 pm)
You must bind each detail level mesh to the skeleton and then leave all skinned meshes at the scene root level, i.e. do not parent them to start01. The exporter automatically finds meshes that are skinned to joints, so it is not necessary to have inside the shape hierarchy.

Torque Owner Tao Ju
#2
11/03/2004 (10:15 pm)
Thanks for the quick reply! It works!!!

Torque Owner Tao Ju
#3
11/04/2004 (10:59 am)
I have 2 more quick questions, now that I got it working. First of all, in terms of the animation working properly, does the meshes and the skeleton and everything have to be exactly the same in the animation files as in the original file I use to export the shape, or do the dsq's only take into account the skeleton?

ie, if I decide I want to change something in the mesh later on, how do I work it so that I don't have to redo all of the animations w/ the new mesh setup?

And secondly, is there a way to change the speed of the animation w/out changing the actual animation? For example, I have a running animation, but at some points the character will be running faster. How do I change the speed of the animatoin so it speeds up as the player does?

Thanks,
Cheryl

Torque Owner Danny Ngan
#4
11/04/2004 (11:34 am)
You do not need to have the meshes in the animation files. Meshes are only read for the DTS file, not the DSQs.

You can override the duration of the animation by changing the overrideDuration attribrute for the appropriate sequence node.

Employee Michael Perry
ZombieShortbus
#5
01/18/2005 (10:19 am)
Hello everyone. We just received two models with different sets of animations and I'm having some difficulty with the .cfg files. The animations are exporting in DSQ just fine, but the dump file is claiming it can't find the ".cfg" file. Everything is setup, I'm running Maya 6, I have a project work space, and the config file is named the exact same thing as the Maya file and DSQ. I managed to get this working before, but something isn't working with this set of models, anyone have a suggestion? Thanks

Torque Owner Tao Ju
#6
02/01/2005 (4:49 pm)
Are you using a mac or pc? I had problems getting it to find config files using a pc w/ version 6. Unfortunatly my solution was to switch to maya 5. When I asked Danny Ngan about it, he said its still in beta, so the functionality might just not be there yet.