JCL could you please clarify to me how it is possible to create bones animation sequences in A6?

I.e. can bone animations created in Blender or Max be succesfully imported to MED, and then into the engine, to be played back in a similar fashion to the way vertex anims can be played back, or can you only manipulate bones via direct scripting?

Thank you for your help.

I´m not JCL but I know that you can do both. It works with ent_amimate if you want to handle them like vertex animations.
Additional, you can use direct scripting.

Thank you Fogman.

Any ideas on getting anims in from Max?

OK I understand,

you can attach bones in MED and you can play sequences of bones animation from c-script (like play "walk" bone animation), or, move each bone individually by code.But how exacly is MED handling bone animations JCL?

In AAA games for example -they typically have mesh files.. which include ONLY the geometry of the models.. nothing else... they also have bones attached to them, but not animated..

Along with that, they have a number of animation files.. with some extension, let's assume it's .anim just for example, these .anim files animate any kind of mesh with bones.. yet they're low in file size and relatively small even when uncompressed in RAM, because they only contain bone movement data, not vertex transformations.

So in AAA games you do something like:

load(badguy.mesh).
attach(walking.anim,badguy.mesh).
play(badguy,walk).

What I want to know is how is it handled in A6... can you import bone animations to a MDL from 3ds Max? If you do, how big will the mdl file be in comparison?

Is it possible to have an mdl with a bad guy,where unanimated it would be 300k or something... and then add say a 1000 bone animations to it, and keep the mdl file still at 300-400k?

If you want to get MAX animations into 3DGS, try the ActorX plugins:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/ActorX.html

Thank you Orange Brat.

@JCL

Can you please spare a little time to answer my questions in this thread from the 11th Apr, on the details of the bones animation system. It would be much appreciated as this information is necessary for my project to be able to progress.

Thanks in advance

There are two kinds of bones animation.

You can create your bones animation in MED or another editor like MAX, MAYA etc, and then import it. This bones animation consists of named scenes and is stored in the model. It's played by ent_animate and normally used for actors.

The second method of bones animation is to create it by script, and play it with the ent_bone... functions. This is mostly used for simple models with only a few bones.

How to particularly create a bones animation is explained in the MED manual or respectively in the manual of the editor you're using.

Hope this answers your questions.

Hi JCL,

Thank you for replying.

Sorry my bump was actually refering to my questions concerning the technical specifics of how the bone animation system works, which is certainly not covered in the manual. However I have investigated further and realised the current bone system is just totally unsuitable for what I have in mind, so I will take my questions/suggestions to the future forum.

Thanks again for responding.