"NWN can recognize position and rotation keys but not scale keys."
The above demo is mainly to show the effect and to show that the lighting and shadow system seem to treat the scaling as legit. Unsurprisingly, the PWK doesn't expand and contract along with the mesh or anything else magical like that- this just scales meshes.
This is definitely not my discovery- I stumbled on a message of Kinaar Greycloak's in the
Omnibus (see "scalekey") while looking for something else a few nights ago. Tried what he suggested by hand, got it to work, was in the process of trying to modify NWMax to automate the technique so people could use it and...discovered that functionality to do just that had been quietly slipped into the scripts way back in Beta 6, back in 2004, and without any mention or fanfare that I could find.
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If you know what you're doing, here's the goods:Scaling in NWN is uniform and so instead of a format which goes:
[TIME] [X] [Y] [Z]It's much simpler, only requiring a time and a scale multiplier, like this:
[TIME] [SCALE]This is accomplished in NWMax by animating scale keys on the Aurora Trimesh modifier's values, not actually scaling the object. You will never see the object being scaled in GMax/3DS Max, only in-game.
Here's how to do it, from scratch, which even a beginner should be able to follow:1. Make your Aurora base and give it a name (I like plc_a01)
2. Create a sphere or box or presumably whatever and attach it to the model base. Add an Aurora Trimesh modifier to it.
3. Select the model base and go down to the "Animations on Model" section
- Make sure "default" animation name is selected
- Start Frame is 0
- End Frame is 100
- Anim Root is "plc_a01" (sans quotes, of course)
- Then click the
Add button, which is just above the big
Reset Zoom button
-> You should now see the new "default" anim show up in the "Animations on Model" list
4. Select the object you're going to animate the scale of. You should see the Aurora Trimesh parameters listed.
5. Click the
Key Filters... button and make sure that only
Modifiers is ticked. For what we're doing, this is all we'll need.
6. With the animation slider at frame 0, click the
Auto Key button. The trackbar will turn red.
7. Click the
Key Icon button, which will lay down a default key for you at frame 0
8. Slide the trackbar to frame 50
9. On the modifier panel, which should already be up, locate the
Scale Factor and increase it to, say, 1.6. As soon as you click it some
red brackets are going to surround the button and a key will have been laid down automatically at frame 50.
10. Turn off
Auto Key11. Move the slider to frame 100
12. On the timeline, locate the key at frame 0. Select it. Holding down the SHIFT key, drag it to frame 100. You copied the frame at the beginning to the end this way. Drag the slider back to 0.
Export your model with animations. It'll start animating even in the toolset. BTW, if you don't already know,
plc_a01 is the Armoire placeable so you can search and find it to place.
NOTE: From Kinaar's post in the thread:
Kinaar Greycloak wrote...
There are always issues, of course, so here's what I've found.
- You can't change the placeable wok when scaling placeables so someone might be able to walk through the edges if you make it too big.
- You have to change the model structure for creatures so that you can also move the rootdummy position to match the scale, meaning that you have to have a different animation set for any creature you want to scale. Check the npc model in the demo for an example.
- Scaling creatures doesn't affect their appearance.2da values, of course, so things like weapon size, wings and tails, walk, run, and combat distances won't change and may make the model seem strange at extreme scales.
- Scaling dynamic models (like the PC races) doesn't work right. Everything will scale except the head. I tried a couple of different ways to do it, but neither the head nor a helmet will scale.
