Hello there,
I am new to this forum and to Gamestudio as well. Now I have a serious problem and couldn't find the answer in the help files. So, to make the long story short, I had a partially animated character. It had body movements animated, but no mouth animation. So what I did, I animated separately the speaking for the head. My question is - how can I have a combination of the walking cycle (for the body) and the speaking (for the head) at the same time? Or in other words, how can I use animation layers and combine them?

This has been a big issue in my work, so I'd really appreciate it if you help me.

Thanks in advance.

bones ?

write ent_animate in F1 help

Well I don't really know. It was bone animation in Max, but I guess when imported in 3DGS it's converted to vertex, because I don't see any bones there.
To be honest, still can't get used to the interface and tools...

//
I'll see in the help about the ent_animate. I thought this should have been possible to be done using the GUI.

It's vertex animation. I read the help for ent_animate and all of the examples are for bone animations as far as I saw. Is it possible to simultaneously to play two different key frame's ranges in case of having vertex animation?

Example: mouth01 - 1-6 (frames)
and
walk07 - 30-39 (frames)
*at the same time.

I hope you get what I mean.
I'd be grateful for your further comments.

nope. afraid not. i would've thought there would be a way to export bones animation from max?

another funky idea is, if you know u are never going to have more than 8 of that one model existing (8 is just an example number) you could have 8 frames of idle pose. assign each character that uses that model a different number between 1-8 (in a skill or something) and use vec_for_mesh and vec_to_mesh with the various frames to edit that corresponding idle-frame number. if each one doesn't use a different idle frame, they would all affect each other.

that's just a basic idea, but it would be best to first find out if you can get bones out of max

julz

Try to named your frames and then use examples from help to combine animations. Just play 0-100% walk animation and f.e. 20-60% mounth animation.

define _mouth_speed,skill10;
define _walk_speed,skill11;
while(1)
{
clamp(my._mouth_speed,20,60); //talk animations 20-60%
my._mouth_speed += 1 *time_step;
my._walk_speed += 2 *time_step; //play with those speeds
ent_animate(me,NULL,0,0); //reset animation
ent_animate(me,"mouth",my._mouth_speed,anm_cycle); //add a bit to last frame
ent_animate(me,"walk",my._walk_speed,anm_cycle + anm_add);
wait(1);
}

But it's only sugestion... right know I don't have a vertex animation model to check this out. And no idea if this will work
Better idea is to import with bones from 3ds

Thank you all for the replies.
I finally managed to change the things directly in Max. (still can't export bones though).
This was the best way to fix the issue, but required additional knowledge, that I tried to avoid in the beginning.