Multi-Animation Question

[marty-bett]

Hey guys just a question,
do u know if they're is anyway of having serveral timelines on the one max file?
i mean i have one object and then have several animations just on different timelines.
The reason i ask this is because i am working together with a friend and we are in the process of making a game and we were wondering to make life easier if we could have all the animations in one file for each character. There is the option of having a set up where frames 0-30 = walk, 31-40 = jump etc.. but that is very anoyying to work with wen u come to program it into the game. SO is there a way to have multi layered timelines, which makes it more organised to work with and more efficient?

thanks in advance cya
Btw. file type to b exported is .fbx so any solutions wud be helpfull if they worked wen exporting

[tomsullivan]

for charactor animation you can. becuase you would use biped you can load animation section like you said a "jump" or a "walk" into the doop sheet.

i dont know much about them tho so you will have to look into some tuts on biped and the doop sheet. but thats wat they are used for

BTW you can also save biped animation, say a jump or a run and import them into other model you ahve set up with biped

if you arent useing biped (its not wise not to) you can still use the doop sheet move around animations, and i am sure there would be a way to save animations without biped but its not coming to me atm.

you should also look into curve editor this controls how the animation between each short animation so you can change it to snap between the two animations slowly or fast

i just had a look in max and i think you can use the motion mixer like the doop sheet but when i did charactor animation i used the doop sheet with biped

Also those things are found in the Graphic Editors pull down.

hope it helped a little

[marty-bett]

yeh i am using biped, thanx for the reply, i thought the mixer was for combining animations so its all in one, and if u save animations its just saves a seperate file (special character studio file) and then u can import it into max, not different ones in same file

[tomsullivan]

i dont know, i havent used biped and its componets in a long time

i just know its around there somehwer from memory

[marty-bett]

thanx anyway mate

[multimediaman]

typically, game engines use one file for one animation...


like there would be:

run.anm
runpistol.anm
runshotgun.anm
runrocketlauncher.anm
walk.anm
walkrunpistol.anm
walkrunshotgun.anm
walkrunrocketlauncher.anm
shootpistol.anm
shootshotgun.anm
shootrocketlauncher.anm
jump.anm

etc.

that to me seems far easier than having one file for every animation a character can perform... as far as I know, the biped system lets you save and load biped animation files... so you have a starting point there, if you can deal with their file types... or you could make a plugin yourself to export whatever animation is going on in the file...

and, using different files for each animation, many people can be creating animations at once, and will never "bump paths" with eachother's files

[Dmander]

Load times could become a problem once ingame,
more that one model accesing the same timeline....
Corruption may also be an issue with such a large file.

Would it be possable to have the separate timelins accessing the same base model,
thus saving on space?