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Hey guys, longtime no see. Was trying to help an old friend to get a Helicopter made for a mod of his but there are some problems. It looks like my help ran out over at SWBFgamers, so I'm looking to have someone to collaborate with to finish this.

It's a Bell Huey Helicopter and it's supposed to have two pilot seats and two side gunners. I got the mesh how I wanted it yesterday (within a decent poly-limit)...
So I was looking to do that and get three animations put into it, which are pretty simple being...

Take off, where the rotors spin up and the doors slide shut.

Mid Air Loop, where the rotors spin at top speed and the doors remain shut.

Landing, basically the same as take off just in the reverse order.

I'll get the animations done fine, but I'm hearing I may not be able to use the flight loop. Pretty simple in concept but coming back from Source modding I'm beginning to remember how awful it was to implement this stuff in the Zero Engine. Any advice or help on this would be great.

The only way you're going to get a mid-air animation is to tie it into a particle effect, and the thrust effect is obviously the one you want to use here. SWBF2 doesn't support ambient animations on vehicles, as far as I remember.

Yeah I knew the engine went back the the old Battlefield games by design so I figured there may have been remnant lines that could support that feature. The particles presents an issue though, cause I know nothing about making particles but I could see that working fine if it matched the blades correctly.

Not sure why he wanted a Helicopter though either, I mean this is the Star Wars universe. A favor is a favor though I guess. Too bad Lucasarts didn't dump the code base on us before they went under, then people could recompile new edits into the thing.

You're not making a rotor out of particles; you're still using a mesh. The difference is that you'll need to animate the mesh in particle effect structure (i.e. use Particle Editor to do it). Just strip your rotor model from your vehicle, load it in as a custom mesh in your effect, and then animate it to spin.

Hmm well then that should work. Not even sure what tools I still have at the moment, but I will look into the ZEtools once again.

Wouldn't mind finding someone who can work with me on the attachment/ODF work though. Been a long time since I've put anything in SWBF, and I can't even compile maps these days.