Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

In working on the Dawnstar tileset, I've started looking at doors. I then immediately got sidetracked into interior door animation. What I am trying to do is make a model that has the following traits:

- Custom collision mesh, and
- The model origin is not along the axis of rotation of the door (for tiling purposes).

Tools are Max 8 with NifTools plugin 0.2.10 and the Civ4 animation exporter.

I've about given up on the first one 'cause exporting an Anim Static layer collision from Max crashes the CS. I worked around that by putting in a Box shape and fiddling with parameters; I don't care for that, but what can you do? The second one is frustrating because the Scene Root is always at the origin and linked to my door. Since I don't understand bones at all, I don't know how to set up the "joint" at the "shoulder" of the door to make the rotation around that point. Within Max, the animation works as expected.

I guess what I'm looking for is either of the following:

- Pointers to making custom Anim CMs (purple layer in NifSkope), preferably using a custom CM,
- Pointers to how to do NON-character-based animation in Max; those are hard to find.

BTW I did get my own auto-keyed Open and Close sequences into the model; they just work around the wrong pivot.

I've enclosed the current crude model if anyone's interested,
Steve

Quote:Originally posted by SACarrow
Tools are Max 8 with NifTools plugin 0.2.10 and the Civ4 animation exporter.

I've about given up on the first one 'cause exporting an Anim Static layer collision from Max crashes the CS.

Exporting any collision with 0.2.10 causes the CS to crash. If you have Max v8 you should use 0.2.9 instead. 0.2.10 is only useful if a user has Max v9 and can't get hold of Max v8.

Razorwing: Thanks for the heads-up. My custom CM does work now with 0.2.9. There is a minor offset bug that seems to be associated with exporting with a manager where the CM is offset by the correct amount, but then the mesh is offset by that amount from the CM, not the origin. I'll try to work around that. If I can, that just leaves getting the animations correct, probably using bones and hinges.

How is your door animation going?

Later,
Steve

Oh, I put that project on the backburner until I get some priority stuff out of the way

Right, there is that little 70-plus year project that just got started.

alot of export issues with pivots rise up when you reset an objects pivot and dont reset its xform center to that pivot.