newbie to animation question…

Thanks for the replys guys…. Yes.. having all the objects in a scene, waiting to be made transparant or being faded in and out gets to be extremely memory intensive. I just wasnt sure if I was missing something. It’s seems so simple of an idea, to be able to bring an object into a scene at any given point, but now I see it’s more than that. I might give Blitz a try… I was hoping my 3DC would be able to fulfill my animating needs. I’m just beginning to play around with it so we’ll see…. Thanks again.

After all these years with 3DC, I’m just now starting to play with the animation. I’ve been dropping very simple objects into a scene, ( a very simplistic robot head for example) And I’ve been playing with things like getting colors and textures to change through the animation, suddenly and slowly. One thing I am stumped on… is there a way to make another object suddenly appear in an animation? Right now what I’ve done to simulate this is to make the objects texture or material 100% transparent, then suddenly changing that when I want the object to appear. This makes for alot of objects in a scene through out the whole length of the scene. Keeping the amount of objects in the scene to a minimum as much as possible really helps…Is there a way of impoting an object into an animation somewhere in the middle of the animation? Thanks for any and all help. Trust me.. this is just the beginning… I’ll have ALOT more questions… Thanks for everyones patients.

You’re probably going about it in the correct way by changing the transparency…BUT..

While most modellers have animation features the normal way to go about creating an animated SCENE would be to use one of the 3D engines.

You then create the animated objects as required in 3DC and load these into the 3D engine…Take your robot as an example…
You could first create say, an animation of it walking and running..just the robot…no scenery.
Next you create the scene for the robot in 3DC.
The scene and the animated robot are then loaded into the 3D engine. You would continue creating everything you need for the scene in 3DC and loading it as above.
You can control each object from within the 3D engine by writing lines of code..most of it quite simple…to make your robot disappeare would go something like this….

HideEntity Robot

Thats it..simple <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –> You could also make it fade in and out, change it’s colour, re-scale it etc.
This way you can create very long animated scenes without using to much memory. This is how your Flight Sim and Medal of Honour are created.

If you would like to give it a try I can recommend Blitz3D for the 3D engine…the demo isn’t save disabled but has a restriction on the size of the file you can write.
[img:2odp5mq8]http&#58;//blitzbasic&#46;com/[/img:2odp5mq8]
<!– m –><a class="postlink" href="http://blitzbasic.com/">http://blitzbasic.com/</a>&lt;!– m –>

There are a couple of Blitz tutorials in the Off Topic section if your interested complete with models created in 3DC.

I think ‘that other Richard’ has some flight sim models and code he’s been working on.

Bazza

Thanks for the plug, Bazza. Yes, I’ve got a few things in the works, kind of buggy, but a couple work nicely.

The real man to talk to about using Blitz, is Bazza, he’s helped immeasuably with me trying to learn that stuff. But if I can help, don’t hesitate to ask. I visit the forum almost daily.

Richard T.