[Kelso]

I've finished with a custom door animation to go with my new "command center" model for Paradise Lost. The w3d file is just the door itself and I exported it with the box marked Heirarchal Animated Model (excuse my spelling) so it would export both the geometry and the animation data. Everything is fine until I view it in w3dviewer to find no geometry. It also doesn't appear ingame. The correct number of frames play in w3dviewer, just no door to go with it. Any ideas what I did wrong along the way?

2nd Question- Is there a way to do animated textures? If so, how?

[Pestilence]

check your W3D tools settings and make sure it is set to export geometry, and make suure that the skin applied is located in the Art/Textures folder inside your Gen/ZH install directory.
if this doesnt help then post a pic of the whole scene from worldbuilder.

for the second question, i cant remember in Gmax, havent used that effent for Generals models yet i dont think.

[Hostile]

the crusader uses animated textures on the tanks treads, look there.

[Kelso]

That's not really an animated texture. The game just moves the texture along the mesh in whatever direction you tell it to. I'm talking about using a series of images as a texture. Like say you had a pool of water and you had a plane making up the top of the water and you wanted to do an animated water effect as the texture for that plane.

I checked to make sure that export geometry was on, still doesn't work even after multiple export attempts.

[Hostile]

(QUOTE)That's not really an animated texture. The game just moves the texture along the mesh in whatever direction you tell it to. I'm talking about using a series of images as a texture. (END QUOTE)

That qualifies as animated textures. (It moves) Your skin probably will not work with generals engine if it has "animated" skin. Cause most often it's a gif skin so it won't work in generals. (Not as a rule but my opinion)

[Kelso]

Actually if you look at most animated skins in games they are not in gif format. They are a series of seperate images that are named in a way that denotes an animation. ie anim01.tga anim02.tga and so on and so forth. This tells the engine to put these images back to back on the model therefore creating the illusion of animation.

[Kelso]

Sorry to double post but i figured out part of the problem. The animation was displaying, or rather partly displaying. I might as well tell what I'm trying to do here...the "command center" for Elysium in Paradise Lost uses a jumpgate to transport its construction vehicles from a home base to the battlefield. The "door" was simply a small animation of the jumpgate opening. I made a cylinder that was rather thin and at the beginning of the animation it is below the ground in order to hide it. Then in 1 frame it jumps into place in the center of the jumpgate and then I used the scale tool to scale the cylinder up until it matched with the interior arch of the jumpgate. However, ingame the small cylinder appears and expands only a tiny bit (this is why I thought it wasn't displaying at all, it was so small that I couldn't see it until I zoomed in). Does the scale tool not work with keyframe animation in this way? And is there another workaround I could use that would give the same effect?

[Pestilence]

if the cylinder is the only object animated you can scale it normally without distorting the animation.
i gues from now on youll import another game object for size comparison.

[Straxovich]

I have another animation question so rather than start a new thread i thought i'd just tag it onto the end of this one

just wondering how the number of frames in the animation effects the games performance. does an animation with only 100 frames make the game run faster than an animation with 200 frames?

and if so is there a limit to the amount of frames in an animation? i only say this because one of my buildings has 1300 frames of animation.

[Kelso]

No, that's not what I meant. I meant that the cylinder is scaled as part of the animation. Basically the entire animation is the cylinder going from a smaller size to a larger size and it doesn't work ingame.