Anim8or Community

I returned home last week, ready to continue working on Anim8or. Unfortunately one of the disks in my development computer hard-crashed the next day, dead, dead, dead. Nothing was recoverable. Not to worry, I have backups of everything important. It still took more than a week to figure out that the disk was really gone, and then get everything up and running, transferring all the licenses to the new configuration, etc.

I should have something interesting posted in a week or so. Big changes coming to Anim8or this fall!

Note: I use Carbonite for backing up my computer. It worked very well. 38 GB of data restored with the click of a button! Thank goodness that I have a Giga-Bit fiber connection at home   So if anyone is looking for a good cloud-based backup service, I highly recommend Carbonite. It cost $59/year for unlimited data on 1 PC and runs almost unnoticed in the background. (They should give me a discount for this plug )

October must be the month of Hard drive failures. I bought a brand new one that took a dive. No personal data, but I am having to re-write some of my an8 code for Game Maker. And THAT is annoying, but alas. it could have been worse! glad to hear you could get a backup going, though!

Nice overview, Rudy. I generally use the 'static mesh' method' when I have something that needs to match an already existing shape, and then cut it apart for things to move. but hierarchical building is a bit more flexible.

Anim80r lacks the sort of 'constraint' system that a mechanical modelling software would have, though (Anim8or isn't made for that, after all!), so really complicated things are going to be a mess all the way around.

Okay, I've used anim80r for a number of years  (since before .98), and I can use skinned animations fine, be they manually applied, or using the default weighting mechanism. However, I'm curious if any of you know how the actual x,y, and z of the vertexes are calculated. I'm trying to implement some scripts for Game Maker Studio that'll let GM: S read and render AN8 files natively. It seems MUCH easier to do then implementing 3DS files, at least.

I know the bone positions are stored in Quarternion form, and I've got scripts for that, as well as for transforming a single vertex based on that. But I'm not entirely sure how to make the vertexes move only partially based on weight. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot written about it in the file's reference.

Any insight would be most appreciated!