Another Animation Problem ANDREW/LAURIE please help!

[ElDiablo (Paul)]

Hey guys!

   Well...I saw that TMD_Micky had done an animated windmill and thought that it sounded like a cool project, so I made my own. First off...I'm NOT going to release it...I just wanted to make it for my own amusement and I have no intention of stealing or ripping anything from Micky.

Anyway...it seems that the animation problems are inherant! lol Mine is linked properly and I've done animation before, so I'm not sure where I've gone wrong here. I've inlcuded the SLT, Texture (only uses one...ya!), the .mot and .vut and .vue files and .Max file so you should have everything you would need to figure out what's going wrong here.

What's happening is when I try to put it together in D2 I get an access violation error (sorry can't tell you the number cause its...) followed immediately by an invalid floating point error. This happens when I have the SLT in the Usermodels/Animated folder. If I move the SLT into the Usermodels folder then I can import it into D2 Studio and the base and rotating assembly (as I have named them) both show up. but when I add the .vue to the rotating assembly and save the .mot files I never get a highlighted SAVE button.

What am I missing guys? This is very frustrating to me to be somewhat of an OG with D2 and still be having what feels like newbie problems! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

One other thing (mostly for Andrew)...after many reformats and new installations (through the years) of Max 3.1, I still have the same old problem with my animated previews. When I create a preview in Max it shows correct when building the preview, but when it plays in Win Media player it's upside-down!? That just blows my mind...any ideas?

[ElDiablo (Paul)]

I caught up with Andrew today...still haven't figured it out. But he's looking. Just wanted to pop in here and give an update since Andrew was so nice to take a couple hours out of his day today. Thanks man...you're the best!

We did figure a couple things out...first off...you have to have the textures in the animated folder and the slt has to be in both the animated AND the usermodels folder before you can place your finished animated object. Also the textures need to be in the animated folder or you will get the error messages that I described. So now we aren't getting the error messages. However, the problem now is that if I export it linked, when I add the vue file to the rotating assembly and save the mot file the SAVE button never becomes available. However, if I unlink it in max and export it in 2 parts it DOES let me save it when I get there. However, the animation isn't working right now and when I save it in 2 parts and build the animation the rotating assembly (fan blades) are on the ground...probably because the pivot point is in the middle of the fan blades.

I'm not quite sure where to go from here. The animation is 30 frames long, I'm exporting it correctly as nearly as Andrew and I can figure. Very perplexing problem to be sure!

[TMD_MickyD]

Hey Paul, in the end mine came together pretty easy, i didnt need to put the .slt in the animation folder or the texture map. I'd say the olny big difference between yours and mine would be that mine uses 100 frames. Ill send all the files of my windmill to the email you use for msn, maybe it could help somehow.

[ElDiablo (Paul)]

Thanks man...not sure wether it'll help or not. But it couldn't hurt! 

[mcm2boys]

Sorry for not getting to this before but i have been away for a week. My ideas for the studio part of D2 was very ambitious and i started it before we found out how much was possible with unibastard eg making multi part objects. I also found that only 1 or 2 people seemed to be using animations and building multi-part models so i pretty much stopped developing it unless there was something i needed it for myself. This has resulted in quirky functionality, but i know it is possible to get most things to work.

I haven't come across the Save button not being enabled, but i will look into it. As for getting your model to work, here are my thoughts. First i would build the whole model in 3D Max (or milkshape if you're feeling like a change ) and import the whole object into D2 Studio. Then add the VUE to the blades and Save the MOT files. The models and textures should only need to be in the UserModels folder (i can't say for sure without looking back at the code, but there should be no need for the model/textures to be in the animation folder). If the Save button is getting enabled try adding a VUE to the Static part and then delete it (i did say it was quirky)  to see if that lights up the button..

You might have some trouble with building the model in the right way but some experiments should lead you to the right combination. The blades should be a child object of the base, and they should be built around the 0,0,0 point (so that the rotation of the blades is around the 0,0,0) and then moved to the top of the tower. The SLT should show the height in the Heirarchy part of the SLT under the 'rotating assembly'.

If you send me the SLT i can check it out for you.


Laurie