animation confusion

General Discussion
#1

im absolutely lost with how the animation needs to be done. im using blender with the egg exported. not sure what i need to do.

if someone could walk me through it it would be great. lets say im trying to animate a cylinder. there is 2 animations; one makes the right side rise up, the other makes the other side rise up (together they would form a ‘U’)

now where do i start?

heres what im thinking:

make the model, complete with the armatures etc. save this without an animation (Say, ‘cylinder.egg’). animate the right side, save it as ‘cylinderR.egg’ and then reload the version with NO animation, and animate the left side. save it as ‘cylinderL.egg’.

if i am right so far, i access the animations like this:

cylinderActor = Actor.Actor(“models/cylinder.egg”,{
“leftRise”:“models/cylinderL.egg”
“rightRise”:“models/cylinderR.egg”
})

and should be able to play either leftRise or rightRise.

i would like to know all this so i can understand Half-body animation better. the out come im trying to get us eventualy making the cylinder into halves, and animating both left (leftRise) and right (rightRise) independently of each other.

sorry if this is a big question. the tutorial was somewhat vague.

#2

usually after you got your model you have to save it with chicken exporter with at least 1 animation otherwise it won’t be animated because the .egg for an animat-able character is slightly different from a a simple model. So you have to proceed like this:

  1. make your mesh
  2. make your armature and add an armature modifier to the mesh
  3. properly assign the mesh vertex to each bone
  4. create 1 or more animated actions
  5. select your mesh object and export it with chicken specifying the animation actions to export
#3

ive gotten this far:
uploadgeek.com/image-8D7E_4A133E5E.jpg

the exported doesnt allow me to specify any action, so i presume i need to select the action i want in the action editor?

what i then did was export the model with the action ‘none’ selected (it doesnt do anything for 20 frame.

then i exported it with the rmove action selected (which raises the right side up over 20 frames).

i loaded them both and tried to play the animation in the same way we do with the panda in the manual but got an error…

bah.

#4

You have to define your animation in the chicken exporter. It doesn’t know anything about what actions are available. It will export different “ranges” from the current action.

You have to click “add animation”, give the animation a name and set a range of frames to export for it. Then you can play the animation in the script with for instance char.loop(“name_you_gave”). This is if you export the animation and model together in one egg file.

#5

You may want to read this excerpt from the chicken help
Anyhow looks quite tricky and honestly I never used it so far

#6

There is no ‘add animation’ button :frowning:

#7

did you followed the steps I wrote above? if you did the button appears otherwise do not.
anyway if you could provide your .blend file for download I’ll give it a peek

#8

success :astonished:

thanks guys.