Unit animations

[Ravendarkc_c]

I made a unit (a bipedal mech) and made a simple walking animation in 3dsmax for the moving conditionstate. Exported it as animation. got it in game...and here is where it goes wrong.

The animation looks screwed up instead of the step for step walk it looks like the unit is jumping/skipping.

Tried to export it as hierachial animated model...same effect.

my animation consists out of a total of 36 frames...frame 5 thill 35 are the actuall walking frames, 0 thill 5 i planned to use as _ACC ones aka getting from its neuteral pose to its walking one.

As far as i understand you declare wich frames you use for what when you export right? 10 -20 or 1 to 100 etc?

Been messing arround with exporting the bones as skeleton only etc. but to no effect.

I can actually mimic the same weird skipping behavior in Max if i delete the autokeys at frame 0.
So i'm assuming (incorrectly perhaps) its a frame issue on exporting maybe?

Any advice on how to correctly animate and export a NEW unit into the game?
I basicly copied the walking xml code from the juggernaut, in the sample art it has a skeleton but iirc its not defined/used in the xml's?

Is there maybe somewhere a decent tutorial on animating units for c&c3? New units that is not using existing ones with alterations?

thanks in advance

[Lauren]

You should check the animation compression settings when exporting.

[Golan2781]

First, what do you mean by jumping? Continuous animations can have different causes for such errors. The most obvious ones are wrongly aligned end and start poses (so they don't match up) or wrong time range in export. It might help if you could cast a short video of the effect or make the W3X available. You might also wish to check whether the animation plays correctly in the W3XViewer.

From the sound of your description, you might wish to check your base pose. When exporting a simple hierarchical model, it will be exported in the pose of the current frame. An animation, too, will be based on the hierarchy its exported with, not necessarily the global 0 frame. Thus, when exporting several animations as hierarchical animated and mixing the animations between different hierarchies, the animations will be distorted by the difference of the base poses.

If you use several animations for a single model, its generally advisable to export the model and hierarchy separately and have the animations strictly reference them (i.e. not using hierarchical animations but pure animations). First, select the base pose (frame 0) and export as Hierarchical Model. Then, export every animation individually as Pure Animation with Export Using Existing Skeleton: set to the Hierarchical Model you just exported.

Note that the Juggernaught pulls in the SKL file automatically from the SKN file (you can find the include to the SKL file right at the beginning of the SKN file and the Hierarchy stored in the SKL file is used in the SKN file in line 54715). Many units do this but its usually easier to integrate hierarchy and skin into a single file - there is no in-game difference between the methods, but you have only one file to handle.

[Ravendarkc_c]

Hmm will take a look at the base pose as i exported it.
i'll upload a frapped video of the effect later if i didn't manage to fix it.