Chrysoli,
I think you're on the right track. If you follow my tutorial, you will reach a point after you have changed the Position controller of your mesh or dummy node to Path Constraint and where you click on the Add Path button and then select your spline. At that moment your mesh/nodes will snap to the spline and if you scrub the animation track you will see it moving along the spline as you move the slider back and forth.
Once you're at that point, take a look just below the anim slider, making sure your spline-constrained mesh is still selected. You'll see little tick marks which indicate which frame you're at. So if the slider is over the number 50, you're looking at frame 50 of the animation. You will also notice 2 little boxes on those tick marks, sometimes solid colors and sometimes multi-colored but in your case they'll probably be maroon and there will be one at frame 0 and one at whaever your ending frame is, probably 60. Those are animation keyframes. Different colors mean different types of keyframes. One color means a position keyframe, another mean Rotation keyframe, etc. Multi-colored keyframs identify themselves as having several types of keyframed animation in that frame. You can always right-click on a keyframe and go up to Delete Keys which will show you a list of what keys are actually stored in that keyframe. If you're clueless about what a keyframe is, I have a quick rundown in the next paragrpaph. If you click on the end keyframe (the little box on the right side of the animation timeline, probably sitting right on frame 60), it will turn white meaning it's selected. Then you can drag and move that ending/last keyframe around. Say to frame 20. If you click off the keyframe onto the animation times (i.e. the little tick marks), it will go back to being maroon again. Now scrub the slider back and forth and you'll see that the mesh/node you have constraint to the spline path will cover the distance in whatever number of frames are between the first keyframe (at 0) and the ending keyframe, which you've now moved to 20. If you are able to see that effect, select and drag the ending keyframe out to 100 or whereever. You should see that the mesh/node which you've set to follow the spline path will now take 100 frames to move from the beginning of the spline to the end of it. Some animation lengths are hard-coded to be a certain number of frames. But not
default animations and not placeable
off/
off2on/
on/
on2off animations. So you can have a ball with those. That should be your solution. I don't think I've ever had a problem with Bake Anims not being able to handle frames over 60. If it is insisting on the end frame being 60 after you've extended your number of animation frames, close it and open it again. It snarfs up whatever the length of your animatin timeline is and fills in the field appropriately. On the off chance you're missing something about changing the length of your animation timeline, it's done by clicking on the Time Configuration icon, which is two to the left of the hand icon in the lower right corner of GMax's screen. Looks like a little clock and calendar thing. Once that dialog is up just go to the spot marked Animation and change the Length from 60 to 100 (or whatever). If you Tab off the field, End Time and Frame Count should automatically update to reflect your new value and, of course, after you click OK on that dialog the animation timeline should similarly show the full frame range.
Keyframes: 3DS Max and thus NWN (because the Aurora engine really seems to be a creature of 3DS Max in many ways) use a process called "tweening", where you don't have to tell 3DS Max/NWN where the object is at any given moment- merely identifing what its status at two points in time will suffice. 3DS Max/NWN fill in the "in-between" movements. And that's "tweening". When we use the Bake Anims, we're actually breaking this process and laying down a keyframe in
every frame. This is handy if you're using a non-Linear controller for your object (like we do with the Path Constraint), which NWN does not understand. So we have to "dumb it down" and "spoon feed" NWN the position and rotatin information in every single frame for the object. We don't always have to spoon feed NWN so much and sometimes we can get by without baking every single frame. On the Bake Anims rollout, under Start Frame and End Frame, you'll see Sample Interval. This means "Bake the controller keys every X frames", relying on the tweening to "fill in the blanks" though with one baked key every 3, 5 or even 10 frames, we're still making it easier for the engine to guess what the in-between movements should be.
Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 23 mars 2011 - 08:11 .
