Models with animations in milkshape?

#1 I can do that for you.

1. Open milkshape.

2. Click the box button on the right, then drag a box onto the canvas. When you've done this you will have a selected (red) box on the canvas. Size and shape doesnt matter for this.

3. Click the joint button and then click the center of the box. The box becomes unselected (blue) and a joint is placed and is selected (red).

4. Click the select button then make sure vertex is selected in select options.

5. Drag a selection box around the entire shape. The joint becomes unselected (blue). Vertices become selected (red).

6. Click the joints tab on the right hand side. Then click the assign button. Then click the set assigned button (I think this makes it so that these vertices cannot be assigned to another bone by you later by mistake).

7. Click the animation button. The current frame and total frames edit boxes become enabled. The frame slider becomes enabled.

8. Click on the menu item Animate, then click on Set Keyframe.

9. Move the slider so that the current frame is the last frame. (the total number of frames can be changed but for this small lesson, don't worry about it).

10. Select the joints tab and click on joint1.

11. Select the model tab then click rotate.

12. You can use your mouse and click and drag the box to rotate it by that joint or you can enter a number into x, y, z in the rotate options.

13. Click on the menu item Animate, then click on Set Keyframe.

14. Click the play button.

Notes... sometimes the 3d view doesnt animate when you do this. Just stop the play, then click on the view that's not animating and then click on the play button again.

This guy has a great site and avi files you can watch to learn milkshape.

http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/blackboard/tutorials.htm

#2 How do you use the milkshape animations in the torque engine? or if you are creating a mod for tribes 2 how do you use the animations within the game?

Thanks
Barry

#3 Well to play an animation you do the following in say a function, so when its called you will get this animation.

%obj.playThread(0,"animation name");

#4 How can you save different animations for the same model?

#5 Barry...read the milkshape exporter...it goes over that. Essentially use create "fake" textures (they are never applied or used as textures) where the NAME of the texture tells TGE about the animation including its begining and end frames. In a single file you might see textures like that that say there is a sequence called "a" from frames 1 - 5 and another sequence called "b", this one a cyclic animation, from frames 6-10 and that both play at 10 frames per second:

opt: fps=10
seq: a=1-5
seq: b=6-10, cyclic