Muzzle Flash

#21 Woah, what's wrong with that? Good work!

#22 I think to progress this further, it would have to be a seperate mesh which was mounted onto the end of a weapon and somehow the animation was played when the weapon fired.. could be done on the trigger I guess... Dunno, need to do some more work, 'cos I don't like the idea of having to move all the weapons around the 0,0,0 axis just to get billboards :-)

Cheers for the comments guys, I'm working on a plasma cannon for my game so I wanted a muzzle flash anyway, it's given me a couple of ideas to work with..

I might do a resource if it was needed, but this was really easy to do once I'd worked around the limitations.

#23 OK, I've made a mesh and dts for this muzzle flash thing. Feel free to download it from my site

It's just the flash on its own without a weapon attached to it'll be a piece of cake to import into another model.. It's not animated and you'll probably have to scale it down a bit, it's a bit big.. but then, I don't know what size your models are do I? :-)

I've included 2 sets of textures, you could use ifl and animate between them if you wanted.. might look quite cool.

Enjoy.

let me know what you think.

[edit: Just to clarify, I made the textures.. so there's no royalty or copyright issues to worry about, feel free to use them]

#24 Looks Great Jason! Nice work!

#25 Sweet, that looks pretty cool with that handgun.

#26 And with the pistol skinned...

#27 Always wondered. How is it possible in Milkshape to "hide" the muzzle flash, but then have it visible in the animation. Hiding faces/the group doesn't seem to do anything in animation.

#28 You use visibility animation. You set your fire animation up between frames 2 and 5 for example, then in the exporter (only avaiolable in the explorter plus version) (I'm assuming frame 1 is going to be used as an ambient animation or something...), go to the meshes and add visibility channels. Starting off with frame 1 with a value of 0, then frame 2 has a value of 1, frame 5 has a value of 0..

You need to enable visibility animnation in your fire sequence. Then when you fire, the muzzle flash will appear and disappear.

Hide in the groups is just a tool for modelling.

#29 But, if placing the muzzle flash group on the tip of the muzzle, then the model (when placed in the world, as well as when mounted) will show the solid muzzle flash attached to the weapon, I think. (As far as I've experimented) I need a way to keep the muzzle flash hidden, and only exposed during the fire sequence.

#30 I must be doing something terribly wrong. The muzzle flash is visible all the time (both in the world with the weapon spinning around waiting to be picked up, and mounted on the player), nonstop, except for in the fire sequence. I got it backwards, lol.

Edited: Fixed

#31 Chris i think you need to have your firing script call an animation on the weapon mesh. when the weapon isnt being fired, it should be playing the root animation of your model which should have the visibility of the flash group at 0. only when the weapon plays the fire animation should the visibility change and you need to make sure your firing script is calling it the function when the weapon is fired.

#32 Oh and btw thanks for the tips everyone, I was starting to wonder how muzzle flashes are done as well. the t shaped billboard idea is the kinda solution i was looking for.

#33 Hi,
Can you please tell me how to do the texture animation thing is 3Ds MAX?

Thanks
-Zubair-