Well I animated a scenery object thats a vehicle and was wondering what type of animation should it be >JMO,JMA ETC... also the vehicle is in the air and all it's suppose to do is fly over head :)

Is this for SP?

Animated scenery is .jma (at least that's what I used for my elevator)

for what it sounds like, you want either a.jma or a .jmw
.jma would be relative to where ever the object in question is placed, and .jmw, according to teh lag, will use 0,0,0 aka the origin of your bsp for the flying ship

^Reading things like that makes me feel stupid, because I have no idea what it means.

well until now, i was reasonably certain that there were only 5 animation types. teh lag posted aon modacity about a 6th type
.jma is the standard animation for something like your flying vehicle scenery
.jmo is an overlay animation
.jmm is a motion animation, used mainly (if not only) by biped
.jmr is a biped specific animation. it is used for animations that have to do with weapon functions, like reloading
.jmt is a very specific type. there are 2 animations for every biped where the move thier feet when you turn too far in one direction. this is what .jmt is used for. turning.

and this new one that teh lag mentioned is .jmw which i can only assume is a world animation. when animating something that uses this, i would assume you would want it to be referenced only by a script. you should have your bsp in the max scene when you animate, because it seems like this is the closest you are going to get to recorded animations.
E: lol hows that for a reference
Edited by Donut on May 17, 2009 at 04:46 PM

why would you use a .jmm for fp? .jma does everything you would need, and .jmo is only used for the overlays and the moving anim. im not sure what the difference is between .jmm and .jma, but i dont think its a good idea to mix them

Me too lol

WOW Donut u know alot LOL I like the JMW sounds very useful... Yeah it's for SP and also I got it to work right after I posted this.... I would however like to ask this If I wanted to map the animation for the bsp how do I use that paticular bsp in a modeling scene and then model the scenery's movment according to the bsp???

You animate the objects on the bsp. Then you delete the bsp for exporting into an animation.

dont even delete the bsp or any of the model geometry. it only exports frame data when exporting animations

OK, just for the record, i'll set things straight with animation types:

First, lets run down on a little thing called frame info. You may have noticed these dx, dy, d-whatever things in the animation tag. 'd', for those of you who are familiar with calculus, means the derivative of--or the rate of change in--something, which is precisely what frame info is. It tells the game, frame by frame, how much an objects transformation is changing. dx, for instance, is the change in movement in the x direction. Similarly: dy for the y axis, and dz for the z axis. There is another called dyaw, which is the change in yaw rotation (or z rotation). Frame info provides additional data to an animation that may be useful for the engine to apply to various situations. For example dx frame info in a running animation may tell how fast a biped is moving (which is what the game uses to determine how fast an AI runs).

JMM is a base animation with no frame info data. This is ideal for FP animations as it does not cause tool to store redundant data (ie: JMA stores dx,dy frame info data, which is used for bipeds).
JMA, as mentioned previously, is a base animation with dx,dy frame info. It is ideal for running/walking animations in bipeds, as it tracks x (forward/backward) and y (left/right) movement data.
JMT is a base animation with dx,dy,dyaw frame info. This is used in turning animations for bipeds, where frame data is needed to track yaw (z axis) rotation. Much like how dx,dy frame info allows the game to determine how fast an AI moves, dyaw allows the game to determine how much the biped turns, along with the dx,dy frame info that JMA provides (hence dx,dy,dyaw).
JMZ is a base animation with dx,dy,dz,dyaw frame info, it provides everything a JMT animation does, but with the addition of dz frame info, which obviously is movement on the z axis.
JMO is an overlay animation. Aptly named, these animations 'overlay' themselves onto base animations or otherwise. Rather than animating the object with absolute transformations, they use relative transformations to modify an animation already playing. An example of an overlay animation is the first person moving animation. Rather than wasting time animating 'moving' variants of the reload, ready, fire, idle, etc. animations, a simple moving overlay animation is used to simulate the "sway" of the gun, regardless of what animation is playing.
JMR is a replacement animation. These animations are more like base animations than anything, but with a few differences. In a base animation, even if some nodes are left unanimated (still throughout the entire animation), in the final product ingame, they will appear as "still" throughout the entire animation. Replacement animations, on the other hand, ignore unanimated nodes. This is useful in many cases, for example: If a reload animation for a biped (tp, not fp) was made to be a base animation, many variants of it would have to be made: reloading while still, reloading while moving forward/backward/left/right, reloading while crouching, the list goes on... With a replacement animation, one can just animate the upper body movement (spine, arms and what have you) and leave the lower body still. This allows the game to play the base animation of running, crouching etc for the lower body and play the reload animation on the upper body. Much more efficient.
JMW is a world relative animation. This is useful for cinematic animations (read: NOT recorded animations, thats a whole other subject). World relative animations are played relative to... well... the world (ie: the origin [0,0,0] point of the level). This allows the animator to animate, say, a pelican directly on the level geometry and have it work flawlessly ingame.


Hopefully this clears up any confusion with animation types (if you took the time to read all that lol)






Edited by CtrlAltDestroy on May 18, 2009 at 02:01 AM

ty very much, that helped me a lot :)

So thats what the dx, dy, dz stuff are for. Thanks :P

that was a long post lol, very informative :P