what are the correct conditions for a blend animation?
by Julie Petrisot · in Artist Corner · 03/19/2009 (5:37 am) · 2 replies
Hello every one!
I want to export a blend animation (gun pose) and I understand the principles of a blend, but I stil cant get it to work correctly in show tool pro... The info I already found on this toppic are:
- you need a reference position on frame 0
- this reference frame 0 doesn't get exported with the rest of the
animation (defined by the sequence begin/end track)correct?
OK this is clear to me. What I am not serten about is the following:
This reference key should be created in the blend reference time track. Do I only set one key there on 0 time? Or does it need 2 keys
(0-1 frame)to define this reference time?
I stil have a few question marks left open.. Is it correct that a pose, like a gun pose, only has to be 1 frame "long"? And last but not least, while experimenting with these combinations adding keys in these tracks
I sometimes get this error message: one export at a time: export code not re-entrant. Does anyone knows what it means or how I caused this?
I am working with the max9 32bit version running on windows vista.
julie
I want to export a blend animation (gun pose) and I understand the principles of a blend, but I stil cant get it to work correctly in show tool pro... The info I already found on this toppic are:
- you need a reference position on frame 0
- this reference frame 0 doesn't get exported with the rest of the
animation (defined by the sequence begin/end track)correct?
OK this is clear to me. What I am not serten about is the following:
This reference key should be created in the blend reference time track. Do I only set one key there on 0 time? Or does it need 2 keys
(0-1 frame)to define this reference time?
I stil have a few question marks left open.. Is it correct that a pose, like a gun pose, only has to be 1 frame "long"? And last but not least, while experimenting with these combinations adding keys in these tracks
I sometimes get this error message: one export at a time: export code not re-entrant. Does anyone knows what it means or how I caused this?
I am working with the max9 32bit version running on windows vista.
julie
#2
greetz
julie
03/25/2009 (1:51 am)
Thanx for the explentaions Logan. I got it to work now and I am very exited about the resuls! about the error message, it was a bug in the dts exporter. I resarted my computer twice and everything went fine after that...greetz
julie
Associate Logan Foster
perPixel Studios
So let's say you have a box that is rotated 0 0 180, and you had this box animate 90 degrees on the Z asis over time. If you just exported the animation as a DTS the exporter round read the box rotating from 0 0 180 to 0 0 270. But if you were to export this same data as a blend (DSQ) the exporter would output the data as 0 0 0 to 0 0 90 over this same time.
When you export a blend, the exporter doesnt care about what your first frame is, just the changes that occur over the period of time it is told to sample.
So now that you have an understanding how it works, here is a better explaination of what you need to do if you want to repose the model from its default stance to something else (ie. from a rifle pose to say a pistol pose).
At frame 0, set the model to be in the default root pose. If you were using the stock torque animations, this would be the model standing there holding a rifle.
At Frame 1, set the model to be in the new position. Say holding a pistol or cocking a bow.
Next add any animations from there that you think you might need.
Lastly you need to set your sequence helper up right. You will want to set it as a blend animation, and to have it sample from Frame 1 to the very last frame of your animation (if you have no animation, set it to 30 so that the exporter has a big time range to sample). Now export!
What this will do is force the exporter to read the blend starting right at Frame 1. Since frame 1 is different than frame 0, the exporter will suddenly see all the changes that you made for the new pose. This way as soon as the animation is loaded the model will pop right into the new pose.
As for your error mesage, I have never seen it before so I have no suggestions there.