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Having spent most of the weekend producing an barely adequate model of a guy in a space suit and giving him a walk cycle animation in milkshape I seem to have hit a problem. If I export him to .x using either JT's or the default .x exporter it loads into DBP fine and playes the animation fine BUT there seems to be something up with the limbs. If I use LIMB EXIST() to check how many limbs there are it seems to return that there are over 30 limbs (Havnt checked further than that) and rotating any of them appears to have no effect on the model. If I export without animation I get 10 limbs which I can manipulate using rotate limb.

The problem though is that I want to use glue object to limb to attach a weapon to the man and have it remain attached - at the moment when using the animated version attaching the weapon (or any other object) to any limb seems to attach it to either his feet or his waist and it fails to move when the animation is run. If use the file without animation glue object to limb appears to work as required.

Question is can I attach an object to a limb of an animated .x and have it remain attached to the limb while the animation plays?

If not I'm going to either have to model+animate the guy holding every possible weapon as seperate files or (gulp) write my own animation code..........

I haven't tried attaching objects to limbs lately, but I have noticed that we can now rotate a limb while the object is playing. This wasn't possible in DBC, at least not in the early versions -- animating the object would override any attempts to move the limb.

Unfortunately, the limb rotates on its own axis with no relationship to the bone structure. If you rotate his upper arm, it detaches at the shoulder and elbow and spins in mid-air. His forearm and hand hover, disembodied.

This is still a great feature if you want to control limbs that have no child-limbs. For example, a cartoonish character could show a big range of emotion by changing the height and angle of his eyebrows (each eyebrow an independent limb), all while the object's animation is playing.

What we really need are multiple channels of bone animation so our characters can walk and chew gum at the same time with their eyebrows rising and angling at will, without our having to animate a specific "walk and chew gum with left eyebrow raised" sequence. It's been hinted over at the RGT forum that this kind of animation control is coming to DBP, and I think it would really open things up, particularly if you're going for realism.

looks like its the programming my own system option then!

Luckily for this project the characters are relatively small on screen (think baldurs gate scale) so the detail in the animation isnt critical so I think just dumping the animation into an array recording limb positions and stepping through it should work.

Might even be able to work out how to do it multi channeled.

Here's that thread I mentioned over at RGT.

http://www.realgametools.net/forums/index.php?board=14;action=display;threadid=16606