Might as well start a thread on getting this shit to work.

Ok, animation is the biggest issue for units in spring. So I figure it is time to see if anyone else out there has been fooling with it/what you might know.

AFAIK there are some endemic problems with it such as it using improper syntax and/or different angle calculations or some such like that, also it is hard to use as IIRC there is no "remove keyframe" capability (so if you make a mistake you're fucked) or any of the more moderately advanced animation options.

I think though someone (maybe Flozi?) fixed something about the output-script creator to make it workable. He and Nemo would have more to say since I think it was heavily investigated for S44 infantry.

No, I didn't use any export. I just made keyframes (carefully, without mistakes <_< - its not bad as long as you remember where your keyframes are) and wrote down the angles that worked well, then scripted the animation based on that series of keyframes.

I never got around to fixing anything. The export script is in lua btw, main problem was that it spewed 23934847 frames if you imported a bvh, and some axes were flipped.

Would it be possible to make an exporter script or say, 3ds max, that generates a text file with all the rotation information of the keyframes in max? Then you could just paste that into the code for the unit. Then again, I'm no programmer, so I don't know how hard that would be, or if its possible.

Seems like it would save a lot of time.

that would require me pirating max.

Ive been thinking alot about this one, since a lot of current units have the following issues:
Jerky movement from tons of keyframes with NOW switches.
Mismatched leg motion wrt movement speed.

What I would like to do, is to use some kind of external animator (i am totally noob to this, any proposed software solution interests me) where I can set up the rigging, and the joint movement limits, then I can drag the feet of units to make them walk.

Upspring animation is a nightmare to me atm.

not in gundam:P

Yeah, I forgot to say that. I want to write a script to replace smoth. So I can smothify ba anims. It will optionally support posting lulz to the forum to make the experience complete.

Blender presumably has skeletal animation tools? I know MAX does, and if you can export it as a bvh, you can import it into Upspring. The problem then comes exporting it back out into usable bos or lus.

Blender can do it and also supports Python scripting. So from my limited (I know nothing) scripting knowledge I assume you could then export vertex data which is (I think?) what Spring uses.

But yeah Blender has good skeletal animation, better than max or maya.

I tried writing one of those, but I am a complete newbie to Maxscript, so I ran into some snags finding where keyframe animation data could be accessed to fully finish it.



Everyone pirates Max.

That's true. It's also a good thing for autodesk, people who pirate it would never buy it otherwise, but they use the software and improve, and maybe get into the industry later. At that point they do buy max :)