Exporting an animation to .X for use with DBPro?

Buy it. That’ll give you the ability to export to X format.

-Mel

I was trying out the Tip Animation tutorial and I wanted to export this to .X to use it with DBPro? andnbsp;How can I do this?

Okay, that puts things in a more sensible light… then my hunch is right – you can’t really manipulate just *anything* you want in 3DC and expect it to translate to .X format.

So, what I’m trying to do is to make a andquot;spikey-ball-lookingandquot; explosion that starts small and gets big. andnbsp;One solution I though of was to just use the fully-tipped model and use DBPro SCALE OBJECT over time to make it animate from small to large.

In a failed attempt, I exported two .X files, one containing the unspiked sphere, and the other containing the full-spiked sphere and tried to use LOAD OBJECT on the first, and APPEND OBJECT on the second. andnbsp;Unfortunately, if I appended to frame 0, I’d see nothing but the unspiked sphere, and if I appended to frame 1, I’d see nothing but the fully-spiked sphere. andnbsp;TOTAL OBJECT FRAMES(num) always returned 0. andnbsp;So, I don’t think I understand about how APPEND OBJECT is supposed to work to do it that way. andnbsp;Also, I’m not sure if DBPro would somehow interpolate the vertices between the two frames anyway…

I made a spinning-n-moving box animation with 3DC LP and exported it to .X format. andnbsp;When I load it into DBPro it animates fine. andnbsp;So, it would seem, 3DC can export .X files with animation involving movement and rotation of objects… but how do I get it to export an animation that involves something more complex such as in the Tip Animation tutorial – where the extrusion parameter for the Tip operation is the thing that is getting animated?

Is there any way to scale an object, or stretch faces around, etc., in an animation that will be exportable to .X?

When you tip something, you’re adding more geometry to the model. As far as I know, that’s not something you can animate in DarkBasic or even most cheapo gamedev packages, now that I think about it. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

Even if you’re not adding or subtracting from the total point count, I don’t know of any 3D game data formats besides MDL/2/3 that allow you to do vertex animation without getting into more arcane engine-side animation techniques such as using DB’s memblocks to shuffle around vertices and update keyframe meshes from a bunch of X models stored on the disk.

DBPro allegedly supports boned X skinmeshes, so that’s basically the only method of animating vertex displacement available to you andquot;out of the boxandquot;, so to speak. I say andquot;allegedlyandquot; because I’ve never tried using a boned model in DBPro, and I’ve seen a few posts here and there complaining about general wackiness.

-Mel

When I do File-]Export-]DirectX (.x), then load the .X file into DBPro, there is no animation. andnbsp;DBPro returns 0 for TOTAL OBJECT FRAMES() for the loaded object. andnbsp;How do I get my animation to be exported with all the two Tip Animation frames from the tutorial intact?