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Character in vehicle

by Andrew Locko · in Artist Corner · 03/11/2005 (9:16 am) · 7 replies

Should my skinned driver mesh be placed outside of the heirarchy in MAX when I export my vehicle DTS? I get that "Skin found on unlinked node" error when the mesh is parented to the start node in MAX. So I'm placing it outside of the heirarchy with all the sequence helpers. The weird thing is, MAX eventually crashes each time I export but it still successfully exports the model and animations when I bring it into the ShowTool. Anyone had this weird occurance?
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Torque 3D Owner Adam
Adam deGrandis
#1
03/11/2005 (11:47 am)
Really and truly, you shouldnt be exporting the character inside the vehicle, regardless of what kind of game you are making. Even if your character can never get out of the vehicle, it still makes more sense to mount the character to the vehicle with script rather than export both as the same dts.

I dont know how to do that off the top of my head, but if you take a look at the vehicle scripts around the site, Im sure you can figure it out.

Andrew Locko
#2
03/11/2005 (12:12 pm)
Well, if I mount the character inside the car, will the character be able to play sequence animations since he would be a mounted shape. I didn't think mounted objects could play animations.

Torque Owner Symbols
#3
03/11/2005 (2:13 pm)
Look at the Crossbow in the fps example, its animated and, its also mounted, so I dont see why not.

Torque Owner Erik Madison
#4
03/11/2005 (2:40 pm)
Yes, mounted can be animated seperately. The code will no longer pick your animations for you, but thats trivial. Just call them manually when needed.

Torque Owner John Cooney
#5
03/14/2005 (3:03 pm)
How would I trigger these animations manually? This is a problem we have encountered in the past trying to animate mounted objects. Looking at the crossbow, it is using the weapons state system to do the sequences. Using this to animate a character seems to be a bit hacky and also I'm a little unsure of how to properly trigger the right and left steering animations.

What would you suggest doing with this?

Torque Owner Erik Madison
#6
03/14/2005 (3:22 pm)
Search playthread in the forums, resources, and code itself. You should find a few good references. You can also look over pickActionThread in player.cc and see how it chooses which animation to play. You'de be doing pretty much the same thing.
I would avoid weapons though, that code is very specialized and does only what it does, nothing else. Reading it will only confuse the subject at hand.

Andrew Locko
#7
04/07/2005 (9:29 am)
Well, I've been able to export an animated character within a vehicle but MAX crashes every time I do this. It does load okay within Torque, however. Out of curiosity, why is it such a bad idea exporting an animated character and vehicle within the same DTS object? Is it a file size issue or would this cause other problems with other aspects of our game? I haven't encountered any yet.