Anomating with Milkshape: How to?

Most of what i’ve seen was set up in ms3d via selective grouping & naming of meshes… then heavy UTF editing for the actual animation to play when called ingame …

so basically (and i may well be wrong) you group the model in ms3d… say a turbine or spinning vent… separate from the ship (like a destructible piece) this can easy be done whilst selecting mesh groups for textures (if you don’t use wraps)… not shure on the export settings… but export with more than 1 group…

Then the hard part begins… i barley understand how FL does it, but its like a bases default animation (spinning tower anyone??) called via UTF trickery (dam voodo!!) adding animations directly to cmp nodes…other variants have been folding wings seen in freeworlds called during cruise… all sexy stuff. UTF isnt hard really & if your in the business of conversion, something extremely valuable to grasp… lookfor the video tuts from sushi on .cmp’s and multipart models to see how he “casually” tears it apart adding code to nodes with grace and ease that will make you cry… then go grab a model & ms3d and try some of the new things you’ve leant… it may seem a tad easyer after a few hours playing with model groups & messing with UTF.

basically, yes, what you have seen was splicing the model into groups that have to move and such, that have not. for rotations, w0dk4 did move the wings as they should rotate around z and on x^y=0 he placed the rotation centre. the actual animation is done within the cmp itself. you can however use max or other programs, even milkshape to have an approx image of how much the wing should rotate and then enter these values within the cmp but an animation can’t be exported directly, not yet.

As others have said, there are currently no exporters (in Max or MS3D) which support animation. Only getting your groups properly set up, and mesh parts properly aligned / zeroed. However, as also said, you need to manually open the file with UTF editor to continue the process of adding animation. For starters; you’ll also need to remove the part entries which will be animated from the “Cmpnd->Cons->Fix” node, then reconstruct them in either a new Rev (rotational) or Pris (sliding) node under Cons -at the same level as Fix. There are a few good threads around here detailing the whole process, and its always easier to drag 'n drop sections from models already containing the same amount of animated parts. One thing to keep in mind is the Parent / Child relationship, which will need to be modified as well. This sets what part of the ship the animated part is attached to. If you get creative you can actually chain parts together with more than one animation for the ship going on at once. This is accomplished with Parent / Child relationships and careful planning of mesh (part) centers. It’s possible to have a ship or station with rotating rings childed to an invisible polygon which has a sliding animation, childed to the main ship frame or another Fix_ed_ part, etc. Something like this would resemble the cloak FX you’ve likely already seen in-game, or possibly the Hover cushion under every ship when it’s docked. Timing on this type of thing could become a factor if you really get creative, but that’s where things get fun anyways Then add in transparent texture animations for heaps of other fun.

Anyways, yeah sort of got sidetracked there but there aren’t any tools to assist with this stuff yet, so it’s UTF / XML / Hex editor fun for now. Still very worthwhile getting to know how it all works. Not a mainstream concern for most because of the time it takes patching it all together; so when it appears, it’s all the more cool to see. Sorta in the same boat as ALE effects, which have added some serious cool to our old girl FL and breathed a bit more new life into her.

Have a look at the last model on my pathetic website for one application of chained rotational animation. Should be a couple videos still up, one in Max and maybe the other in-game.

Here’s the in-game footage with a couple parts moving. Disregard the test materials and botched depth bugs lol. I think at the stage in the video I hadn’t implemented the Docking Sequence’s 4 inner Pris doors or the chained Rev entry doors, so outta luck there for show n’ tell there. But that’s just an example of having more than one separate animation used on one model using different triggers. The rings are a loop type (infinite run), while the doors are single run at docking time. As I did with the doors, you can delay action of one part so it appears as if two animations are used (outer Revs run, then inner Pris runs after matching their time to Rev’s ending).

Learned one other thing on this model, you can have more than one Cmpnd->Part_namehere referencing the same File name, in affect creating a duplicate without actually modeling another piece. Just have to tweak its offset matrix and voila.

Regarding chained animations, the stock mining ship is interesting (DATA\SHIPS\UTILITY\MINING\mining.cmp). The three starboard arms are all Rev, but the first two port arms are Rev, with the third being Sphere. Same effect, though.