Anim8or Community

General Category => General Anim8or Forum => Topic started by: BladeMan.EXE on March 26, 2015, 11:34:51 am

Title: Three questions about the scene editor.
Post by: BladeMan.EXE on March 26, 2015, 11:34:51 am
1. Is there a way to attach an object to a bone in a figure? Like a character picking up an object or wielding a sword?

2. Is there a way to animate the texture on an object? Like the screen on a TV or an I Phone?

3. Is there an easy way to remove an object and place a near identical object in it's place? (This being plan b for if the answer to question 2 is no.)
Title: Re: Three questions about the scene editor.
Post by: thecolclough on March 26, 2015, 11:57:17 am
the answers to all three of your questions will probably involve visibility keyframes.

1. the usual method in Anim8or is as follows: you start the scene with the figure and the prop object as two separate elements, and then at the point where the character picks up the prop, you use visibility keyframes to hide both of these and swap to an alternate version of the figure which is holding the prop.  can be fiddly to match up the keyframes for the character's pose, but i think (not 100% sure) there might be scripts floating around which can help with that.

2. not at present - you have to set up different versions of the object with different textures, and again use keyframes to swap between them.

3. if you want the item to move around, then you might want to consider attaching both versions to a target, and animating the position/orientation of the target.  both prop versions will automatically follow the target's movement.  alternatively, depending on the type of change, you might want to look at using morph targets.
Title: Re: Three questions about the scene editor.
Post by: Steve on March 26, 2015, 12:31:39 pm
1. Not yet :) This is one of the things I'll be adding to the scene editor later on and part of the next major release. I don't know the release date yet.

3. You can animate the visibility of things.  If you put two or more identical objects but with, say, a different texture on them, you can hide one and show the other, then switch. If you want to change every frame you can do this with a script for their visibility (so you don't have to set a ton of keys):

$visibility = frame & 1; /* First object - hidden in even frames, visible in odd frames */
$visibility = (frame + 1) & 1; /* Second object */
Title: Re: Three questions about the scene editor.
Post by: captaindrewi on March 26, 2015, 02:14:50 pm
re 2. yes.if i understand your request correctly.

backward engineer the enclosed file :)
Title: Re: Three questions about the scene editor.
Post by: BladeMan.EXE on March 26, 2015, 02:48:52 pm
re 2. yes.if i understand your request correctly.

backward engineer the enclosed file :)


Kind of a big file by my internet's standards, and I can't use scripts with the version I'm using. Thanks anyway.


And thanks for the tip about using targets.
Title: Re: Three questions about the scene editor.
Post by: neirao on March 26, 2015, 06:17:27 pm
2. Is there a way to animate the texture on an object? Like the screen on a TV or an I Phone?