Alright, I need to learn how to do animations, so for example, what I want to be able to do is something like. Animating a covenant dropship to come into a map and drop off grunts or something. Or making a biped move its arm.

Think of that part in Halo a30 where you see those drop-pods flying straight into a cliff.

I think to do this, I would need to import the model of a bashee(or whatever), and attach it to frames???

I would really appreciate any help on this.

I can't find any good tutorials on this.
Edited by Xoronatus on Feb 20, 2011 at 09:10 PM

Mmm I only know that you animate ships, or dropships using scripts. If you want to animate characters, you need 3ds max.

As I see, you want to create cutscenes for a single player map, I never understanded this part of script cutscenes, few people know about this topic

Uh, I think it works like:

1. Import model of your map (don't know how to do that, something about .obj files??)
2. Import model for your dropship
3. Animate the dropship the way you want it be in the map
4. Export with chimp
5. Script the dropship to appear and put AI inside it, and have it run the custom anims
6. Done

I'm pretty sure that's how it goes. The problem is I don't know how to do all of that.

Thanks for your input though

Xoronatus

Actually you need to include a Biped character in the model of dropship, then you script the map, to make the dropship fall

-Use a bsp converter to convert a scenario_structure_bsp into an obj (or, if you made the map, just use the map's model in max)
-Use the gbxmodel importer to import the gbxmodel of the vehicle you want to animate
-Freeze everything but the frames (if you made the map, delete the frame for the bsp you made)
-Animate the frames along the timeline using 3dsmax
-Unfreeze everything.
-Use an animation exporter to export the frame animations as a .jmw (.jma, .jmm, .jmo or whatever for other kinds of animations)
-Compile the model_animations
If:
data\ cinematics\a30phantom\animations\fly-in.jmw
then enter:
tool animations cinematics\a30phantom
-Script dropship to fly in. There is a firefight tutorial that explains the rest.

if you want a good scripter PM muscl3r