Animations?

#1 Hi Duion,

You could try to import your model with animation in Milkshape 3D or Fragmotion software and check out if all character animations are playing correctly without significant deformation. If all goes satisfactory, then you might export your model and animations from Milkshape 3D using ( .Dts ) file format to Torque 3D.

I hope this might help you.

Cheers.

#2 Did you manage to use a default animation on a custom character? The problem I have is that collada files get corrupted when I load them in blender, so I cannot learn much from the default animations, or reuse them.

#3 @Duion as you are using Blender
import of collada models that are animated is not going to help you much

just take a custom character or rerigg the t3d soldier model to your own rig
and
u can actually import a custom character/ with lets say alll animations

when the character gets imported those animations are all located in the ambient animation

u can simply split it (ofc you should know wich frame to frame is part of
the run/ jump etc cycle

as you are using Blender
what u have todo in Blender before export is
to bake the animations into the mesh/ just animate your character
or take a already animated character and
by pressing the spacebar u get the search menu , there just type bake and click on it to bake your animation
(note this is assumed you use a newer version of Blender)

dont worry about the eye cam and so on/ those things can be added in Torque3D`s ShapeEditor aswell
that should give u at least a start.
later you would just need to name your animations the way the standard animations of the Default Player are named
that way you could already see your model runnin around and so on

maybe
Steve
or Bryce might be able to explain this better
hope this helps

#4 I don't want to have the animations in the models ambient animation, since I want animations that can be reused on all other models, it would be way to much work for me to make around 50 new animations for every character by hand in a row in the ambient.
You should be able to just throw a "run.dae" animation into the folder and it works with the model you have in there, this is what I want, this way you could improve and interchange from time to time.

#5 and u can do that aswell
just export your baked animation either with the character model or without
and place it in the respective folder
just take a quick look at the T3D Soldier models folder files
there you will see a cs file that is responsible for the animations order

look @ soldier_rigged.cs located game/art/shapes/actors/Soldier

and now with taht being said
what does it cost you to just try things out
believe me you will waste much more time with writing scripts
(maybe waste wasnt a proper phrase, lets say loose)

#6 "Just try things out" costs a lot of time and nerves, I hoped someone who had done this before can give me a little example of a workflow.
Learning and making a character with all animations from scratch would take several month.
While other things are mostly good documented somewhere, animation is not.

#7 Duion
if i could provide a better explenation i would do however here is
a video that someone has made that might help u further
there is a 2nd part aswell that is going to explain some stuff about the shapeeditor

#8 I watched this video, what I mean is a full tutorial on how to make a character, rig, animate and import it to the engine, with all functions.

I already managed to import an extra animation for the soldier, but somehow it did not blend well and the whole soldier mutated into a big blob from time to time, with arms and legs coming out of him in all different directions and I had to reset the whole project to get rid of that.

There is a lot of problems you will encounter if you want to do more than a cube that moves from point a to point b.
Another thing I encountered was on how to make animations that perfectly blend and loop.

With Torque on some places you are pretty much left alone, while other engines have big community and tutorials for everything.