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3 Dimensional Chat / limbs ain't quite limby enough

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New Creature Feature
20
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Joined: 27th May 2004
Location: Tennessee- USA
Posted: 22nd Mar 2005 08:20
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I'm finally trying to animate a character I made. Since he's a robot the limbs are supposed to move very, how do you say, robotically.

I loaded the objects as meshes, converted them to a mesh, made the arms, legs, etc. into limbs, thinking that they would some how be jointed to the body, but when I go to rotate the limbs they leave the body and rotate around this giant arc.

How do I connect these limbs to the robot's body? I thought adding them as limbs connected them. I couldn't figure out how to link them either. I have DBC and DBPro.

Here are the objects/meshes...
1. Head
2. Body
3. Left Arm
4. Right Arm
5. Left bolt (that holds arm to body, should probably just merge it to the body, I'll do that later)
6. Right bolt (diddo)
7. Left Leg
8. Right Leg
thanks!

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. II Corinthians 5:17
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G Man
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Joined: 17th Nov 2004
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Posted: 22nd Mar 2005 12:32
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You do it by placing the limb's pivot point at 0,0,0 in the modeller.

Intel Pentium 4, 3.4GHz, 1280MB RAM, NVidia Quadro FX3000/256MB, 240GB HD, XP Pro
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krannock
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Joined: 19th May 2003
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 22nd Mar 2005 20:12
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Hi there,

My idea (yet to prove myself) is to make a model that is almost a skeleton itself. apply bones/ animation to it and then create the arms, legs etc as the main model has the limbs grouped etc and is small you could then attach object(arm) to limb (arm on main model) then ofset it around till it lines up with the main arm limb and covers it copletely. as the object is glued to that limb it should move with the limb when it is animated. (I think)
You could in theory then change bits during the game by just removing the object that is on and replacing it with a new one.

hope that made sense. and helps.

Smile it could be worse....I smiled...it got worse!
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Van B
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22
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Joined: 8th Oct 2002
Location: Sunnyvale
Posted: 22nd Mar 2005 20:23 Edited at: 22nd Mar 2005 20:24
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Really, you should rig that puppy in your modelling package. If your lucky enough to have 3DS Max then I'd suggest that, but really you should build your robot and animate it inside max, then load the whole lot into DB.

If you want to animate it with code, then a limbed model would actually be easier to use as you'd only have rotating limbs to worry about.

As Krannock says, a skeleton of some sort makes it a lot easier, without a skeleton to bolt your robot limbs onto your looking at a shedload of headaches.


Van-B


It's c**p being the only coder in the village.
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Elthan
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Joined: 29th Jul 2003
Location: Spain
Posted: 22nd Mar 2005 20:50
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Animating limbs in 3dMax:
1.- In Max, put limbs together making the robot (likes Carrol´s character... stupid joke).
2.- Select a limb (head). Look for "affect pivot only" and click it.
3.- Move the gizmo to pivot position (on neck).
4.- Click on button "affect pivot only" again.
5.- Click on link (2 boxes conected by a chain), click on head and drop in body.
6.- Move head to check your work and continue with all limbs

Animation:
Limbs are animated as bones. Keyframing: add a keyframe in each change of position/rotation/size and 3dmax will interpolate between keyframes.

To export correctly your animated model, use last version of panda exporter (search in google).

I hope that it helps you. Forgive my english.
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New Creature Feature
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Joined: 27th May 2004
Location: Tennessee- USA
Posted: 24th Mar 2005 07:52
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Thanks for the help guys

I'm currently using TrueSpace 5.2 and I have access to 3DS at school. I have avoided doing the bone thing cuz it has really been a pain to get the bones to fit correctly into any of my models, especially in TS.

I know I need to learn it so I guess I can give it a shot. Now can you animate a boned model in DB Pro by rotating the bones (limbs?) or do you have to actually export the animations from 3ds as well?

thanks

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. II Corinthians 5:17
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