Hi all,

I have several animations on the same character in different Maya files. Is there a way to use all animations on the same character in the game?

I'm using vertex animation, so the Export and Import animation functions in MED don't help.

One way I can think of is to copy all the animations into one big Maya file and then export that. But that seems like a pretty clunky way of doing it.

Is there any other way to address the problem?

Thanks!

no one? Really?!?

you can only blend bone animation i think..or you can morph models to get needed animation, but then it can looks realy weird and stupid

Maybe export anims from each segment you want then re-import them into one file?

ok, maybe I'm not making myself clear. I'll try again.

My character has several different things it can do, like run, walk, fall down, die, jump, etc.

I am using vertex animation, NOT bones. Comments about bones will not help me, don't waste your time

1. Do I have to export all of these animations from the same Maya file? (Master.ma contains the run, walk, jump, fallDown, and die animations.)

2. or can I have several Maya files, like this: run.ma, walk.ma, jump.ma, etc

3. If I can have several maya files, how do I go about playing the animations on the same character?

I know that I can export the animations from Maya and reimport them into Maya to create a master file, but that is a REALLY horrible solution in terms of workflow.


... Forgive my insistence, but I've worked in the game industry for eight years now, and I've never encountered a system where all of the animations for a character have to be in one file. If this is a requirement for gamestudio and there is no workaround it is a serious limitation that needs to be addressed.

Why do you think this is a limitation?
If your character is in the middle of a running animation when it hits a wall, you want to show a different animation like stand/idle whithout a hard switch from one animation to the next animation.

You can blend the vertex animations from your current animations frame to the target animation to let it look like a smooth transition.

With ent_morph you can change the run.mdl to die.mdl if you want, but this would create a hard break in your animation.
I would only go this way if I have already a lot of assets created as separate animated models. Otherwise I would advise that your artist should change his workflow to create the best fitting export files for the selected game engine.
If he does not change his workflow, the developer has to create the functions to make the animations smooth.

If you work against the engines techniques, you create additional work for your developers.


[hint]
The second model should be preloaded in order to prevent harddisk access during your animation change.

You can use ent_morph to replace a green tree with a burned tree if you use some big explosions and fire.

I hope it helps a bit

-- slacer

Uh, you're right, exporting everything as different MDL files and morphing the models to play different animations is definitely not the way to go

But I think you misunderstand what I'm asking for. I'm looking for a way to keep my animations separate in Maya, but merge them into one MDL file after exporting.


> Why do you think this is a limitation?

Where do I start?

The pipelines I'm used to working with treat animations and models as independent. I.e. you can export animations one by one and in the engine you decide which model you want to play them on.

This is pretty convenient since the animators can work independently from each other and export at different times. You can test and troubleshoot animations separately from each other and you don't run the risk of introducing bugs in one animation when you're fixing a different one.

Maya files with a lot of animations in them are unwieldy and hard to edit, especially if you want to change timing (if you lengthen or shorten an animation)

Also if you make a change to just one animation, you have to redo all of the markup work for all animations in MED again. And again. And again. It gets old pretty fast, and it's error prone.

If you are working with a team of animators you have to come up with a procedure to merge all of their work into one master Maya file. These kinds of things are usually tricky and error-ridden, and IMHO this is an unnecessary source of aggravation.


I could go on, but I hope I've made my point. It's just not a very good pipeline, especially if you have a lot of animations and several animators working on a project.