3d Animation

[Evan Eubanks]

Hey Guys,

Do either of you know how to program animation in XNA? I'm trying to get it to work with a FBX file that has multiple meshes for one object (a star wars AT-AT actually). The Model object in XNA has each mesh listed as a mesh _and_ a bone, but I can't seem to rotate the bones with any effect. It could also be that my code is wrong.

Do I actually have to make each mesh in 3ds max a bone, or is the FBX file i have right now fine? I want to be able to rotate the top of one of the ATAT legs and have the rest of the leg (the children bones?) rotate accordingly.

--
Evan R. Eubanks
Quality and Assurance Level Two
Gearbox Software, LLC.

[Matt Meyer]

I have exactly 0% knowledge of 3d animation. It's something that I want to learn in the future, but my focus has been put on gameplay programming.

Sorry.


--- On Fri, 3/6/09, Evan Eubanks <sayai...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Trey Tomes]

That is actually going to be the topic of the next meeting of the Dallas XNA
Users Group (http://www.dallasxna.com). The meeting was supposed to be on
February 17th, but it was canceled. Hopefully Rick will speak on the same
topic in March instead. The next XNA Users Group meeting is scheduled for
March 17th, and will be on importing data from SoftImage XSI into XNA.
Different program, but I bet the process will be the same regardless of what
program you use to create the model.

Alternately, you could check out these links from the XNA Creators Club:

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/sample/skinnedmodel

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/sample/simpleanimation

The first link looks more applicable to what you're wanting to do; importing
an FBX file and animating it using the model's bones. Let me know how it
works out for you. :-)

[Evan Eubanks]

The first one has the animations already built in 3ds max. I don't want pre-made animations before I load it up in XNA - I've been using the second one as a reference, but I'm not sure why my code is producing different results than his.

If you guys are on later tonight, I can post the code to see if you can find holes.

[Trey Tomes]

Post it tonight and I’ll see what I can make of it.