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lisa · 25th August 2007, 06:08 PM

Cool. Are you writing your own game, or making a mod?

Just for clarification: are you asking how to rig a model for animation using AC3D, or how to create animation keyframes with AC3D?

AC3D doesn't have the ability to create animation keyframes; you'll need to use an external program like Poser if you're wanting to create keyframe animations.

However, AC3D can be used for basic animation rigging and is useful for games that use procedural animation instead of keyframe. i.e. Most racing games don't animate the cars in advance, they do it in real-time using physics equations instead. AC3D can be used to create and setup models for many of these types of games.

Bones are only needed for soft-body animation (i.e. deformable characters) because of the blend weights. For rigid body animation (i.e. vehicles) a simple hierarchy and pivot points for each mesh are all that are needed for many setups.

You can access the Hierarchy View in AC3D from the Tools menu. Object centers can also be set on the Tools menu.

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TECHNICAL SIDE NOTE FOR PLUG-IN DEVELOPERS AND THE CURIOUS: Although AC3D doesn't have native support for blend weights, I've actually been using it to rig deformable models by using either a texture map as a weight map, or more commonly by using overlapping vertices and then just merging the verts and dividing by the number of overlapping vertices to get the blend weight in my exporter. Painting a weight map is of course the more refined way to do it, but even the overlapping vertices method works surprisingly well for simple characters.

25th August 2007, 06:08 PM	#2
lisa Senior Member Professional user Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Phoenix, AZ Posts: 917	Re: need help with Ac3D Cool. Are you writing your own game, or making a mod? Just for clarification: are you asking how to rig a model for animation using AC3D, or how to create animation keyframes with AC3D? AC3D doesn't have the ability to create animation keyframes; you'll need to use an external program like Poser if you're wanting to create keyframe animations. However, AC3D can be used for basic animation rigging and is useful for games that use procedural animation instead of keyframe. i.e. Most racing games don't animate the cars in advance, they do it in real-time using physics equations instead. AC3D can be used to create and setup models for many of these types of games. Bones are only needed for soft-body animation (i.e. deformable characters) because of the blend weights. For rigid body animation (i.e. vehicles) a simple hierarchy and pivot points for each mesh are all that are needed for many setups. You can access the Hierarchy View in AC3D from the Tools menu. Object centers can also be set on the Tools menu. --------------------------------------------- TECHNICAL SIDE NOTE FOR PLUG-IN DEVELOPERS AND THE CURIOUS: Although AC3D doesn't have native support for blend weights, I've actually been using it to rig deformable models by using either a texture map as a weight map, or more commonly by using overlapping vertices and then just merging the verts and dividing by the number of overlapping vertices to get the blend weight in my exporter. Painting a weight map is of course the more refined way to do it, but even the overlapping vertices method works surprisingly well for simple characters.