A question about "Alien running" applet

[PeT]

Hi Mr. Olsen, I have a question about the example about the alien which is running on a sphere, how did you do that? In specific, for instance, how can I move a pair of legs of an animal and looks like a real animal move? Do you draw subobjects or deform a single object?

Thanks for all your atention. :?

[manumoi]

hello

I am not completely sure but i think this is an MD2 model. So the alien itself was not made by Egon (i remember that he said somewhere that he was definetely not an artist).... For bipede animation, 3DSmax 8 provide very useful tools to made them (that s what i am currently learning to do and the tutorials are very well done).
After that you have many possibilities. Either you try to export them in the MD2 format. Plugins exist for this task. Or you try to develop your own animation format. I think raft told me that he did that using interpolation to obtain movements between two states of a given object. Correct me if I m wrong.

[raft]

i export each key frame as a seperate 3ds file then load them and feed meshes into an Animation object. after this it is equivalent to from loading an md2 file.

either way, for smoothness frames are interpolated between key frames by Object3D.animate(float index, int seq) method

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r a f t

[PeT]

Thanks for your tips, but, can you recommend me a good free plugin? I found one, it's called qtip, is trial version, but when i try to export the animation (made with 3ds max), the plugin sent me a message: "Nothing to save. Are all objects to save selected and mapped?"

Thanks again.

[Melssj5]

QTIP is a S.H.I.T. I lost some money for that md2 exporter, I recomend you to use 3ds animation instead of md2 animation. qtip only allow you to have bmp textures lower than a small small small small resolution, I dont remember the size. Qtip also export the mesh turned and mirrored, no way to fix it turnig  again the mesh.

[PeT]

I believe you Melssj5. About 3ds animation, I read that I can play a range of frames of a total animation made with 3ds max. My question is the next: How can I read a range of frames from the animation? for instance, my animation consists by a character running, walking and jumping, and the animation lenght is 300 frames; Is possible to read with JPCT, only the range of frames that containing "jumping animation" when a key is pressed? If it's possible, how can I do it, because I know that the animation is a .max file, JPCT supports .3ds files and .3ds files only contain the mesh. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.

Thanks for all.