Basic animation help - 3ds

[sfkhooper]

Thanks to everyone for all the replies. I appreciate you all taking the time to offer me advice. It certainly seems there is plenty of latitude when making a choice about animation software.

I have to admit that I'm confused by the comments about no animation in 3ds. I have a trial here and it seems to have very cool animation features, as shown here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoc4t7dQvGo, amongst loads of other examples I found. Is there perhaps something about 3ds animation that makes it unsuitable for Irrlicht?

I am kind of stuck on the idea of 3ds max because I know there are a lot of really high quality objects available for purchase that I can drop straight into my project from the likes of turbosquid.com. You see I am going to be working on a commercial grade project with this soon and whilst I'm confident of picking up the skills to wield Irrlicht, I will _never_ be a competent modeller or animator, so these areas need to be contracted out. From what I have seen of the commercially available objects, all of the human life-like stuff seems to be centered around 3ds max. I'd love to be shown otherwise though. Basically I need access to some really professional looking medical industry humans, such as doctors, nurses, patients and associated clinical props.

I have a really simple biped in 3ds max and have setup an animation of him waving his arms about. I installed kwxport for 3ds and exported my biped to a .x file. I then loaded that file in Irrlicht thusly:

Code: Select all

scene::IAnimatedMeshSceneNode* anms = smgr->addAnimatedMeshSceneNode(smgr->getMesh("animate.x"));

and setup the animation thusly:

Code: Select all

anms->setFrameLoop(1, 50);
anms->setAnimationSpeed(15);

but unfortunately the guy just stands there on frame zero doing nothing. Can anybody suggest why the animation might not be running?

Bear_130278, you indicate Panda as a step in-between 3ds max and the .x file format. Is Panda another 3ds exporter, like kwxport? What is the difference?

Lastly, can anybody point me to some decent quality 3ds models with read done animation sequences, preferably g-rated, natural looking male/female humans? I just want a good quality object I can work with while I learn Irrlicht and build a proof-of-concept app to show the client.

[Acki]

I have to admit that I'm confused by the comments about no animation in 3ds.

3ds has (can have) animations, but Irrlicht doesn't support it...

and setup the animation thusly:

Code: Select all

anms->setFrameLoop(1, 50);
anms->setAnimationSpeed(15);

but unfortunately the guy just stands there on frame zero doing nothing. Can anybody suggest why the animation might not be running?

maybe the animation speed is to low, try 1500 or even 15000...

[sfkhooper]

3ds has (can have) animations, but Irrlicht doesn't support it...

Than what is Fraggy on about here? http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... ht=3ds+max

[sfkhooper]

3dsMax+Panda->.x ))

I installed the Panda plugin and exported to .x with it, but I still don't have any animation in Irrlicht. In the console window when I launch my Irrlicht app I get a lot of errors such as "Unknown data object in frame in x file: ObjectMatrixComment", which is repeated many times and "X loader: Duplicated vertex, animation might be corrupted" which is duplicated a couple of times.

There's a lot of options in the panda exporter. Is there something specific I need to do in it?

[Acki]

3ds has (can have) animations, but Irrlicht doesn't support it...

Than what is Fraggy on about here? http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... ht=3ds+max

I'm using 3Ds max, a Physic-modified mesh that I exported into .X file (with kwxporter).

And I had to set the speed to 7000 lol.

[ACE247]

Your best bet for a .X Exporter for 3DS Max will be the Panda plugin.
Link: http://www.andytather.co.uk/Panda/direc ... loads.aspx

[brick]

I'm having a similar problem. I've exported an animated skinned biped as a .X file with kW Xport. However, in irrlicht, the character animation is not working. If I select the entire character (the mesh and all the bones) and move it around in 3ds max, it moves when I run the irrlicht project. However, specific bits of animation related to a single element (head, arm, leg movement) aren't working.

It would appear that the biped's animation is not properly exported with kW Xport. I've tried using Panda exporter, but the program breaks at the line where the model is loaded, and the following error is reported: "An unhandled exception of type 'System.AccessViolationException' occurred. Additional information: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt."

[brick]

I have made Panda work by changing some of the export settings. Running the irrlicht project shows the character moving all the right limbs, but the character itself looks flat, like a stick figure.

It's the same with kW x-port: the object moves properly, but it doesn't look right. When I convert the object to editable mesh in 3ds max and export it like that, the object looks right, but it's not moving.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/703/figurem.jpg/
Does anyone know what may be causing this? The same thing happens with both exporters. Maybe I need to adjust some of the settings to fix this?

EDIT:
Fixed it. Just in case someone gets the same problem: it was due to resizing. After the completion of modelling and skinning, you shouldn't resize the model.