Animation Editor
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The options in wadmerger are stored in 2 places: the menu bar and the toolbar. The most important ones are in the toolbar, the other ones in the menu. Some options from the menu have hotkeys. A full list of all menu commands is shown below. If more information about an action is available, the title is a link.
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The toolbar contains the most used options of the animation editor. All buttons are listed below. If more information is available, there is a link included.
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The objects frame is used to work with multiple objects in the same window. For the moment this is only useable for the jeep, in the future you might be able to see how lara uses a kickdoor or key_hole this way. From the drop down menu you can select an object. If you are for example editing the VEHILE_EXTRA object, you should be able to select the JEEP from this menu. The boxes on the left are disables for now, in the future you can use them to select which moveable you are editing.
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In the render options are some objects that effect the way
OpenGL handles the moveable. On the left are 2 buttons below each other
named Model and Animation. When this mode is enabled, you
can right click on a mesh to select it. For more about the animation mode,
see chapter 2 - Animating objects.
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The render window is the most important part of the
animation editor. It shows you the model and you also use it to place
textures, move the meshes or make the animations. To give you a good
view of the model, a camera view is included which allows you take a
look at all sides of the model. You can enable auto rotate in the toolbar
to make the object rotate itself slowly, or you can use the manual camera
mode using the mouse:
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All textures of the current model are shown in the textures frame, next to the render window. The textures are separated from each other and placed on a white/gray background. This is done to avoid textures being not visible because of the background. The textures can be selected by clicking on them with the left mouse button. A red frame is places around the selected texture. There is also a green triangle on it showing which part is visible if you place this texture on a triangle. This triangle is places in the side of the texture you clicked. If you click in the right bottom part of the texture, the triangle is placed there.
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In the animation frame you can select the current
animation and frame. You can also edit some options of the selected
animation or set how to play the animation in auto mode.
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The meshes frame is for controlling meshes. You can see which mesh is selected or change the selected mesh. There is also a button MeshTree Editor. This can be used to add meshes to your object or to delete meshes. This is explained in chapter 4 - Advanced animations.
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The status bar does not contain any options. It contains, as the name says, the status of the animation editor. Currently there are 3 values shown there: the number of frames rendered per second in the render window, the number of faces that are rendered and the memory that is used by the object, undo buffer and some other data needed by animedit. This does not include the memory OpenGL uses to story the textures or to render the model.
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In order to edit animation, you must check the Animation
button in the render options. Now you
are be able to animate the meshes. This might look hard, but you can learn
it fast. If you are new to making animations, read the what to animate
section below. It will tell you what you can and what you can't. If you
want to start directly, go to the rotating meshes section. If you
are already well in animating, you should go directly to chapter 3 -
Effects & AI - to learn how to connect animations or add effects to
them. |
2.1
- What to animate
If you are new to making animations, you might think (hope?) that you
can make lara talk, close her eyes or move her fingers. This is a
possibility, but it's not so easy. Here we got rule 1: You can only
animate full meshes. A mesh is a collection of faces (triangles or
rectangles) of which objects are made. A mesh is static and cannot change.
A mesh which is in a wad file will stay the same. It's not possible to
change the textures of it or to move rectangles inside a mesh. |
2.2
- Rotating meshes
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2.3
- Moving objects
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2.4
- Frame commands
In the menubar there is a menu called frame.
You can use the options in this menu to copy and paste frames. The copy
button will place the current frame in the memory. This will store the
rotations for all meshes and the position of the object. You can use the paste
(replace) button will replace the current frame with the copied one.
The paste (insert) button will insert the copied frame after the
current frame. There are also some options for working with frames in the toolbar.
There are 3 buttons in here, which are located in the 3rd part of the
toolbar (each part is seperated with a vertical line). The first button,
anim wizard, is explained in 2.5. The other 2 buttons work very easy. |
2.5
- Anim Wizard
Sometimes there are simple animations that need a lot of frames. For
these animations there is an animation wizard. You can find it in the toolbar.
Clicking this button opens a new window. The wizard has 4 steps. After
each step you click the next button. The first step is an
introduction. |
Animations are not only rotations. Rotations might be very important, the state changes are just as important. Effects might look a bit more advanced, but they are also important. Or do you like enemies that can't die or make sounds? |
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3.1
- Linking animations
An object that plays an animation is nice, but most objects have more animations. They need to be connected with each other. This is done using the NextAnimation and NextFrame. These values appear in the animation (see 1.7 - Animations) and in the state changes. The values in the animation are used when after the last frame has played. Then the game will switch to the animation and frame which is in there. Mostly NextFrame is set to 0, which means the animation will start at the first frame. |
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3.2
- Basics of the state changes
Objects in Tomb Raider were getting better in each game. Enemies have
improved a lot in tr4 compared to tr1. These improvements can be seen if
you look at the animations. In tr1 there were human enemies that had just
15 animations, in tr4 it is about twice as much. And the game engine that
controls these enemies hasn't changed much. |
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3.3
- Setting up state changes
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3.4
- Editing anim commands
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3.5
- More about anim commands
Most anim commands are self explaining, but here is a list of them anyway:
The play effect command will show up a big list of effects. These effects are the same as the flipeffects in roomedit. That means you can also use these commands in your project, but most of them are special designed to work with objects and are useless in a project. Here is a full list of flipeffects:
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3.6
- Sounds
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There are more features then just rotating, state changes and anim commands. These features allow you to change the layout of meshes or even add new meshes. |
4.1 -
Moving meshes
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4.2 - Speed and acceleration
Using the speed and accel options you can make objects move in an
animation. You can also use objects using anim commands, but that happens
after the animation is completed. With the speed and accel
objects move with a constant speed per frame. I'm not sure what the scale
is, but I think it's in world coordinates. In world coordinates a sector
is 1024 and a click is 256. The object can only move forward this way. |
The animation editor has a simple build in texture editor.
To activate it, you must check the Model button in the render
options. Then you are be able to select faces in the render window.
The following actions are included. They all work by clicking a face:
If you want to place a texture, you must select one first from the textures frame. The textures frame works the same as in TRLE, except that you can't select a part of a texture. If you texture a rectangular face, the whole texture is placed on it. If you texture a triangular face, only the part between the green lines is placed on it. You can select this part the same way as in TRLE, by clicking in the corner you want. |
When making enemies, you need to know the states of it. In
this reference are the full lists of animations of some enemies. The lists
have the same layout. In the first column is the animation number and a
small description of that enemy. The second one contains the stateid. |
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6.1 -
HAMMERHEAD
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6.2 - DOG
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6.3 -
DEMIGOD2
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6.4 - SAS
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LARA Lara has a lot of animations, so they are not all listed here.
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