bones and mesh

k just for testing, i made a big box, put another box inside and called it bone, not sure if i gotta do anything else to make it a real bone

ok i looked at the grunt modle and i coudnt find anything that shows its connected to the mesh to make it move, unlike the skin modifier, so i was wondering how i connect them



i finaly got bones to animate but the mesh wont stay with it, skin modifier doesnt work

Hey

Although this is explained fairly well in the documentary, i'll explain it here again.

To create Bone-Objects (not, bones, but special objects that wc3 reccognize and uses), you need to do the following things, i'm not sure at the order, and you can without doubt do them differently (like do a sphere instead of a box or whatever):

Create a Box primitive on a good location respective to what that "bone-object" should control. F.ex. if you are gonna create a upper-leg bone-object, just place it on the upper leg (location is theoratically not all that important).

If you still have the model in one piece (f.ex. a humanoid), you have to select it, add a edit-mesh modifyer in the modifyer tab, press the polygon sub-choice (in the edit-mesh folder in the modifyer tab), and then you simply select all the polygons that represent the part which you want your new bone-object to control. F.ex. for a upper-leg bone-object, you would select all the polygons that represent the upper leg. Then you simply press the "detach" button. You do this to all the areas that need to animate specificly. So in the end a humanoid model should be cut into alot of pieces (left and right: feet, lower-leg, upper-leg, upper-arm, lower-arm, palms...and whatever else, head, torso, whatever).

The number of bone-objects should be the same as the number of cut up meshes.

*NOTE* If you were just making a box, and you just wanna animate it simply, you don't need to cut it up or anything, and you should only need 1-2 bone-objects.

You need to name all your bone-objects with a "bone" prefix (may be different, like "bone:" or sumtin)

You need to go through all your bone-objects, open up the user-property-editor (name might be different) in the utilities-tab, and with the bone-object selected, you need to flag the "Bone" option, that will mark that box as a bone. Thus not "rendering" it when you preview it.

EDIT!!: You also need to select each bone-object, go to the motion-tab, and for each bone, switch out the bazier rotation/location controllers for TCB rotation, and Linear location. As bazier will without give you problems. This is pretty easy, just find the controller list, select the rotation-controller, press the button near the list, and choose TCB from the list.

You also need to go through all the cutted meshes, and in that user-property-editor you have to press the "connected" button, that makes it so that they automatically connect to near meshes when you preview it, so while you animate the lower-leg away from the upper-leg, in reality, in the previewer, the lower-leg just gets stretched away from the upper-leg. For this to work, then the whole model, all the important meshes have to be aligned at frame 0... so all vertexes connecting upper and lower leg need to be on the exact same spot.

Then, you need to select all meshes, and "link" them too their respective bone. F.ex. you would take the upper-leg "mesh", and using the "link-too" (not sure about name, it's a button in the toolbar) tool, link them too their "bone-object", so the upper-leg mesh would be linked too the upper-leg "bone-object". Thus making the bone-object a parent over the mesh, so whenever you move the bone-object, the mesh moves along.

Then you also might need to link the bones together to form bone-chains, f.ex. link the lower-bone to the upper-bone... link the torso (or whatever) to the "origin" bone-object and whatever. This is so when you f.ex. move your origin bone-object, the whole model would move along with it.

When you are here, you kinda are set to start animating. But just remember to not tauch frame 0 in any way, frame 0 has to be in the exact alignment so all meshes are connecting to each other.

So it's often good to start at frame 10, and it's also good to try to get the previewer working good to be able to quickly preview your work, cause whatever animation you do to the model in the viewport looks wierd, as the meshes don't connect correctly :) that's why you have to always use the previewer.

Anyways, hope this helped. If you need help regarding note-tracks, you can check out a post i did to a thread named "animations" in this forums.

Cubasis

Edit: Just a few pointers, When aniamating for WC3, no "skin" modifyers are needed. If you just want to animate a box to make it bounce or whatever, you can f.ex. just create one small box on the main box, flag it as a bone-object. Link the main-box to the bone-object. And...i think you might then just start animating, that's it..i think. Just move the Bone-object then.

sry to make u type all that cuz i figured it out by myself lol, i learned how to modle and animate in less then a week with no bodys help cuz u all took too long to reply lol

i made a dinosour rex looking thing , i have walk/stand/attack animations somewhat done, i need to add detail to them

BUT im having problems with bones(normal 3ds max ones) they are showing up in game, they should be invisable tho whats going on

hmm :/

I just wonder, what are you doing with "normal 3ds max ones" bones in your model? :/

Cubasis

em i just stuck the normal bones in there cuz it was easy lol, it seems to work for me, but why would they be showing up...

Did you flag them as bones in the user properties?

yeah sry i looked above and it said that lol, ill look over all of what u wrote, sure there will be some usefull info there, thx alot