Animating Model in gMax... Problems...

Hello, I'm currently working on a cop car model and I'm having a little problem animating the sirens. As a matter of fact, I'm having a little problem animating anything.

For some unknown reason, the animations won't show up in-game at all. They are not even detected.

I attached a few screenshots to illustrate the problem.

Step 1: Apply teamcolor glows to several planes, in order to immitate hero glows and used them as siren lights.

Step 2: Placing the siren glows accordingly.

Step 3: Placing the siren glows accordingly.

Step 4: Adding bones. Blue glow attached to BlueGlowBone and red glow attached to RedGlowBone.

Step 5: Finally, animating the siren lights.

Unfortuneatly, the animations are not detected in-game, as if they weren't ever created anyway. Perhaps someone could help me animating this model? Any help is greatly appreciated.

use the skin modifier to envelope bones around the mesh. Otherwise they wont export. You cant simply attach in gmax for war3

Sorry, yes I did use Skin modifiers on each of the glow planes in order to link them to their respective bones. Lastly, I tried animating the bones and then the glow planes were animated altogether.

Seems like it should work right? It doesn't.

...anyone? I've been trying different ways in the last couple of hours but nothing works either. Though the siren glows work properly, no animations are displayed.

Any help?

Be patient. If someone knows how to help and has the initiative to help you, he will. So stand by and wait, don't dispare.

I know nothing of how animation for wc3 is done in gmax, so I can't help.

I've been trying to figure out the problem. For some reason I believe the problem lies around bone setup. Until now I only had each colored glow "skinned" to their respective bones, then animated the bones.

Though only now it came to my knowledge that I must use Bone Helpers, which I have no idea what might be. Given I must animate a simple square plane in order to have it scaled continously in a loop (Big, small, big, small), what has to be done? Create a bone, then a bone helper, and skin the meshes to the bone, and somehow link the bone to the bone helper and then animate the bone helper instead? Oh help.

I've been doing some animating in gmax lately - and although I have achieved horrible results and concluded that it's a regular pain in the... to animate in gmax I'll tell you about the experience I have with the program when it comes to animating:

- If you have the car as one whole mesh, then of course: select the wheels and the other stuff you want to be animated and "detach" these things into seperate objects.

- Create bones within (or nearby, depending on what you prefer) the meshes you want to be animated.

- Add skin modifiers to all the meshes you want attached to the bones (you have to click "Add bone", select the bone you want to attach the mesh to and then expand the envelope selection, so that it covers all of the mesh (or a part of it - this sucks when you want to move the particular mesh, though)).

- Then setup the time (Frame rate: 960, "Start Time" and "End Time" whatever you prefer).

- Time to start animating. Some tips:

• Remember to have "Animate" selected, whenever you animate (<- this sounds pretty obvious xD).
• You can place rotation/position/scale keys in the "Motion" tab (sometimes the program will do it automaticly - not always).
• Mind the controllers you are using - I have experienced some buggy things when using "Bezier Position", try using TCB controllers. *NOTE: Even though I have tried several different controllers SCALING modifications always seem buggy (ie. I scale something on the Y-axis in gmax - when I export, the mesh will be scaled on the X-axis (for instance). **NOTE: There's probably also a compability issue with the controllers you use and the controllers DeX support - if you experiment with the controllers, and nothing comes up on export, this might be the issue.

- Export:

• Remember your animation times when you export with DeX (you have to add all the animations by specifying the start/end times of them, you probably know already).
• Remember to have EVERYTHING selected when you export with DeX (that includes bones and cameras (if you have them added)).

If I missed something, or what I'm saying is nonsense, feel free to correct me =).

EDIT: As for your issue about having the planes scaled: as I said before, whenever I try to scale anything and it shows up fine in gmax, it never shows up fine in WE/Wc3 viewer.

Thanks so much for the reply, oBs3rv3r.

However, I had already done exactly what you pointed out to be done. Perhaps, if you have MSN we could speak more objectively? Again, thanks for the help.

EDIT (don't double post anymore): Good news I got it working! Thanks a lot, oBs3rv3r!

Though the animation is shown properly in ModelEditor, it doesn't show up in WE! Its as if it was a doodad or something, without any animations! Any help on this?

No problem, man. Glad to hear that you got it working!

I think your problem is your animation names. Warcraft will only play certain animations like "Stand", "Stand - 1" "Walk", "Birth", "Death" etc, etc.

So name your animations like that (Stand animation = Stand (and so on)).

Here are a few screenshots to illustrate the matter:

ModelEditor:
You can see here there is a stand animation, where the glows spin, resembling a real cop car.

WE:
You can see here no animations are detected by the editor!

That is odd indeed. Only thing I can think of is maybe redoing the skin modifiers (since I heard these could be bugged from time to time) and re-animating. I know it's a pain, but that's currently the only thing I can think of.

Gotta do my admin bit; FalconWest please do not double post.

I did not. I have no intentions of raising my post count if thats what you're concerned about, I replied to the same thread posting relevant information.

EDIT: I redid all of that, it didn't work either. I'm definitely not doing it again, something must be missing, any ideas?

You posted twice in a row, and only 20 minutes after the former post; that is against the rules. Just edit your posts instead of posting again. Read the FAQ.

Edit: You did it again..

From what you're telling me, I can't think of anything that might be missing.

You have specified the texture paths in the .mdl and converted it to .mdx, imported it, and it doesn't work?

Well, as I see it you could make three apporaches:

1. Make a simple cube in gmax, attach it to a bone, animate it, import and see if it shows up animated in-game (as a debugging approach - to see if any of the things you export actually show up animated in-game).

2. Try another kind of animation (instead of scaling do some rotation/position anims - also for debugging (just to give you an idea of whether or not it's an issue with the animation type)).

3. Attach your model here so people might have a look at it. Maybe someone around here will be able to spot the problem once they have a look at it in gmax/3ds max (or just have a look in the .mdl).

If we manage to actually solve this problem.

EDIT: You could also try another version of DeX to export.

Btw, does anybody here know which kind of controllers DeX/Wc3 is compatible with/does anybody here have the DeX readme?