Another Huge Breakthrough!

[Stridor]

Ok guys, it is still early days and I have a lot of decoding still to do, however I am pleased to report that I have animation (at least some simple tank animation) working in MS3D!. It looks promising now that MS3D can be used for EVERYTHING.

Still a lot to do, but this is a huge breakthrough! It means you guys can now start doing your own vehicles (horses, bikes, tanks, etc) and almost certainly will include infantry animations as well.

Previously PCK would crash at every single stage for animations out of MS3D, so it took a long time to figure it all out.

So great news. As usual a tutorial will follow. For those that want to start thinking about what it takes to make and rig a tank model model you could do worse than start with the original max tutorial which can be found here http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=1183794. The concepts will be the same for MS3D as for max, just some of the details will be different.

Anyway I am real happy to report this news. It looks like $35 bucks will get you the whole enchilada now WRT graphics modding for PCK.

Remember this is a preliminary report, I still might find some show stopper, but it looks very very promising at this stage.

Regards

S.

[himmelstoss]

wohow [X(], this is taking off!!

wish i had the time to play around with moding. but i am always frantically awaiting new mods and am eager to play them all.

weiter so,

himmel

[Mobius]

Would the model scaling factor be the same in Milkshake as it is in Max?  1000mm/2.54= Max scale.

[EagleMountainDK]

This is great news Stridor, it gives us "normal" people a chance for modelling [&o]

You are a true master!

[Biffa]

Idd [&o] Stridor rocks!

It'll be interesting to see what can be done.

[Mraah]

Wicked awesome !!![:)]

Appreciate all your work !

EDIT NOTE : Regarding the tutorial ... Would the animating addemdum for PcK (manuals folder) be better or worse to reference?

[Mraah]

Here's something handy ... along the lines of Animation.

ToyMaker website had this article http://www.toymaker.info/Games/html/loa ... archy.html

Available for download from that article is an XfileLoading program ... small, visual basic program. Zip is small too, 828kb. Also, the source code for this program is available too. It comes with a bones.X example to work along side the article.

It can be used to view the Animation of a mesh element ... body.x .

In the SS below, I am viewing Stridor's Panther G Late ... body.x ... as it animates through the keyframes. You can load any X file with it and watch it run through the animation.

Perhaps this would make a good cheap small tool for viewing your X file elements without having all the fancy software.

Let me know and I'll post the ZIP's (program and code zip) in a new thread so it can be found easier.

Rob

[Stridor]

Thanks Rob for that it might be helpful. You can see your animations (and have to do them anyway) in MS3D.

I am coming further along with my experimentation. Everything so far looks good. I plan to make a really basic model and do a tut on animating it soon.

Hopefully the flood gates will then open!

I can see it now

Horses
Bikes
Funnies

I noticed that there are several really nice tanks and WW2 vehicles in Sketch Up wharehouse. Some of them are definitive. In theory would could import them into PCK. In practice they are just too big to be of any use (polygon wise).

So you could use them as a basis, but as always you need to target the model to your audience.

Thanks

S.

[Mraah]

Correction on the wesite where I got the Xfile loading (I have editted my original post).

It's from the Toymaker website ... http://www.toymaker.info/Games/html/loa ... archy.html

Sorry for the confusion.

Rob