FL Animations

Mini_Me

Alllright, since things seem to appear a bit calm on the home-front…
Here is the place to show some animations you’ve managed to add to FL models in-game.
Yes it’s a bit limited, but there are still quite a few things possible within the confines of Freelancer’s animation ssystem.

Sooo, lets see what fun things ye’ve coaxed outta the models. Along with a vid, perhaps a rough description of which elements you changed.

me don’t really wish to re-post the one I’d done for the habitat again, so perhaps after I refocus on FL I can add a newer entry

Forsaken

Who all even knows how to do this?

Syd

old but:
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=C7z_HStUmSk

and i belive i have to post a tutorial^^

Sushi

Would love to see this tutorial. I could really use it for X-wings/B-wings in FWs.

Mindhunter

@Freeworlds_Sushi:

Would love to see this tutorial. I could really use it for X-wings/B-wings in FWs.

YAY had the same idea.
Someone has posted all the vanilla animations attached to the baydoors somewhere.
If we find a way to make the Xwing closing his wing when he turns to cruise than…… i need to kiss someone

Sushi

@Mindhunter:

@Freeworlds_Sushi:

Would love to see this tutorial. I could really use it for X-wings/B-wings in FWs.

YAY had the same idea.
Someone has posted all the vanilla animations attached to the baydoors somewhere.
If we find a way to make the Xwing closing his wing when he turns to cruise than…… i need to kiss someone

Hell, I’d give them my first born…

Mini_Me

The thread where a lot of this was worked out is Here -reply #72
With just FL (not FLHook /FLAC) the only initiations [so far] for an animation are: docking / jumping, firing, jettisoning cargo, tractoring, and constant.

You’ll notice in the thread mentioned, that it is possible to make entirely new sequences -new frame count, length of time, parent / child, even change or add the type without copy / pasting from vanilla.
So yeah, here… push the boundaries people

**woops, just remembered, that would only be reply 72 if you sort by newest posts.

Wolfie

@Freeworlds_Sushi:

Would love to see this tutorial. I could really use it for X-wings/B-wings in FWs.

ive played freeworlds, alot actually

if ya could manage that i would absolutely “try” the mod out ;D

Sushi

@Wolfie:

@Freeworlds_Sushi:

Would love to see this tutorial. I could really use it for X-wings/B-wings in FWs.

ive played freeworlds, alot actually

if ya could manage that i would absolutely “try” the mod out ;D

Well then, I better pray that tutorial for this function comes sooner rather than later…lol.

Firekiss

And how to animate guns? I mean you can see the use_animation = Sc_fire thing at all weapons, the weapon models have the animations, but they don’t do anything. Has anyone managed to get them working?

BBalazs

Sushi, you have been given a link by Mini_Me - I will copy-paste it here.
http://the-starport.net/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=26&topic=462.0
This old thread has all the info you need to make the X-Wing and B-Wing S-Foils animated, except for the cruise trigger - I assume that has to be done with FLHook, and we need to get one of our mighty FLHook coders involved

In SHORT - so don’t consider this a tutorial, just some quick guidelines - what you need for animations is:

Multi-component ships, where the to-be-animated parts (wings) are all separate components
(So while you are at it, why not make a multi-component sur as well? It does come handy, considering animation, especially on a B-Wing!)
Having the CMP exported as multi-component, you will need to work with the Cons: Fix, Rev and Pris nodes.
Fix: your non-animated components come here
Rev: your animated components come here (in my experience: Rev ==> Revolution, rotation style animation)
Pris: your animated components come here (in my experience: Pris ==> Translation, moving style animation)
You can use the XML Project to add/remove nodes in Fix, Rev and Pris (be careful with all that raw data you will manually edit. Use common sense in determining where each part in the node starts and ends. Make sure to change the node size variable respectively. You can use the XML project to modify those parts of the Rev and Pris nodes that UTF Editor will NOT modify for you)
Make sure you have no doubles! (For example, a component present in both Fix and Rev/Pris) In my experience, an exception to this is the very LAST component of the Fix node.
Set up the Rev and Pris accordingly - the center, direction and amount of rotation is set up here (or seems to be at least)
When done, copy an Animation node from a vanilla ship into your very own CMP and modify it accordingly. Refer to Mini_Me’s link to understand how this works.

When the animation is set to be triggered by cargo jettisoning: CTD on pressing F7 ==> You have doubles in your Fix-Rev/Pris nodes.

I hope this helps. Getting the center of rotation done well seems to be VERY tricky and frustrating, or maybe I was just plain stupid and missed out on something. I found that the center of rotation is actually 0,0,0 - the center of the ship (actually, the component), and in oder to move this somewhere else, you have to center your component in MilkShape so that the center of rotation for the component is the very ORIGIN - 0,0,0; and then have the position of the component changed later in the Rev node’s, I think, Offset section.

An X-Wing would need all 4 of its wings as separate components, and a B-Wing its left-right wings as 2 separate components - but if you want to be true to how the B-Wing should work, and make it similar to official games, like X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, you have to assign the components (somehow) like this:

Root ==> Cockpit
Child of Root: BottomWing ==> The “vertical”, long wing panel which contains the engine area, and the bottom cannon as well, the “horizontal” wings are connected to this
Child of BottomWing: LeftWing
Child of BottomWing: RightWing

You will need to have BottomWing rotate 90 degrees from the bottom to the left side of the cockpit, and have LeftWing and RightWing fold onto BottomWing simultaneously, which is a near 90 degrees rotation. The very problem with this is the changing center of rotation –> everything depends on IF the FL engine supports having multiple parent-child component connections and not just a simple root-allothers style hierarchy.

Mini_Me

Parent -> Child can be nearly any thing. You can have say… a cockpit as Root & parent, then the body as Child to that, while the body is also a parent to the child wings.
Further, each part can be animated independently. So you could have a funky animated body rotating while some sort of power structure slides up and back along it, each at their own speed.
The Root, however, cannot be animated (it cannot appear in Fix, Rev, or Pris), so keep that in mind. If your design calls for your main structure to be animated, instead use a dummy 4 sided pyramid located out of sight and use that as your Root -if it will be in the open, then use a 0.000000 opacity texture.

When importing bases and such, you’ll notice that there are meshes like “door_poly_lod1” and such; those are what make rotating doors a bit easier to work with, as the Door itself is a Child to the door_poly_lod1, and uses it as the center / base of rotation.

You’ll also notice in all weapons, the rotating part (turret, barrel, or both, depending on construction) is listed in Rev.

BBalazs

Placing that dummy-root pyramid: I’d say put it into the very center of your ship, if possible… In my experience, NPCs will always fire at the center of the Root - and if the Root is not inside the ship, the NPCs will have some rapid horrible aim.

Sushi

Thanks for the help, guys. I’ll definitely be looking into this more and tell you my results of it.

w0dk4

Thanks for the summary of how to do it

I think we will have a few ships with wing folding in Freeworlds 2.0

Mini_Me

A couple side notes:

As mentioned by BBalazs, the part will use its 0,0,0 origin as the rotational point. This is why we see doors on many base models all biffed up when importing into Milkshape. Previous importer versions did not take offsets into account when importing, so they all ended up at their natural origin of 0,0,0.

This has two side effects:

You can leave parts where they are within Milkshape, and have them rotate or slide from there. To see this, have a look at my Hive Habitat; both side rings are exported exactly as they appear there, so no further offset modification was necessary, it is a spherical model after all. I was working on a funky pyramid base with outer walls as kind of armor. Each wall was child to a telescoping arm, child to a central pivot. The inner walls were solid but for one opening, so if you timed it right you could actually get inside and dock with the base itself. Unfortunately, working with only 4 walls ends up requiring 16 parts due to each component only able to rotate or slide on one axis. So that left 2 meshes for the rest of the base $:-\$ not real ideal. Just a little tidbit to keep in mind.
Or you can do the most common method; move your moving parts to 0,0,0 and then tweak their positions via offset. As noted, DA used polygons as bases of rotation for doors. So parent = door_poly01, child = baydoor_1 etc. This allowed them to place the poly where it needed to be and only need to tweak small amounts from there. Crack open an Outpost to have a closer look at this.

Just because an item is located within Fix or Pris does not mean it can’t be attached to a Rev component or vice versa. This is another area Parent -> Child relations play an important role. That’s how I managed to attach working dock doors to the central rotating rings on the Habitat, and the side rings rotating on X, while central rotates on Z. It’d be nice in the future if we could exceed 18 (or was it 21?) parts for cmp export. But still, there’s quite a lot we can do within the current limits.

Good luck animating

w0dk4

Also: UTF Editor v1.4 can edit Rev/Pris nodes, the only thing it cannot edit are the strings in those nodes. And also it cannot create new rev/pris of course.

Mini_Me

Good point w0dk4. You can create the node name, but that’s it really, or you can copy over a node from another cmp file. In either case, you’ll need to hex edit the contents to add / subtract parts within the node data.

To do that, I usually keep an exported Fix, Rev, and Pris file handy. Open a file with the required node already present, select the node, then click the “Export” button and save it as a .bin so you know what it’s for; example: “RevTemplate.bin”
You really only need one entry in each for a template, since you can select all -> copy and then paste once for each new additional part. After re-saving the modified .bin file with your to-be-modified cmp’s name, switch back to UTF editor and this time click the “Import” button with the corresponding node selected. Re-save the cmp, then use UTF v4 to edit the numeric values, and UTF v3 to edit the strings (parent / child names) via the “Edit XXX data” buttons. You could edit these names while in your hex editor, just be sure you know the character length limits of each name (mentioned earlier in this topic).

w0dk4

Btw.: Could someone upload the UTF Editor v1.3 somewhere?

Because I couldnt find that version anywhere on the net

Bejaymac

@w0dk4:

Btw.: Could someone upload the UTF Editor v1.3 somewhere?

Because I couldnt find that version anywhere on the net

Not a big surprise W0dk4 as that version was never officially released, I’ll have a look in my files and upload it in a bit.

EDIT

I’ve uploaded it to the downloads section, but as it hasn’t appeared I guess it needs someone to authorise it first.