Alright I dunno if this is covered in the FAQs or anything or if its some obvious thing I didnt look into, but Ive g2g in a sec so I have to quickly ask this.

How do you create new bones? and add animations to them 'n stuff.

can someone shed some light on this?

It totally depends on what you want.. A unit has a very complicated bone structure, with, indeed, bones and nulls acting as roots and effs. Whatever you want, a new unit skelleton would mean over 70 new animations with this skelleton, so i don't think that's what you want..

Then there's the vehicle/prop bone structure. This is also used for tentacles. You simply place some bones, and envelope the part you want animated with it. Vehicles, props.. They need one or two anims and they're fine. This means you can make your own skelleton, no problem at all. Tentacles don't need a animation at all, so simple as well (though they are other guidelines concerning tentacles)

Then there's walkers. Pandemic used bones, without roots and effs. Walkers have not much animations, i guess a 4 legged has 20/40, and a 2 legged only 10. Still, walkers are buggy, and the code you load them with, requires things to bones.

My main theory; don't be creative on bones, be creative on enveloping, and weighting. Bones can be anything basicly, a bone is just an object where you envelope something on. I suggest try and envelope your mesh to an existing skelleton, and try a lot of different weightings and enveloping, then see if you need a new one. Except for vehicles/props, since these are very simple. You can always take an asset's skelleton and scale it, move it etc a bit, no problem; export it as a basepose.msh and you're fine..

That was MandeRek Bone Radio for now, over and out

i understand all of that, i am wondering how do u creat a chain to use to envelope, if i was to like add 3 chain links to the fingers so i can make little movies for fun kinda thing

xXxINSANITYxXx wrote:i understand all of that, i am wondering how do u creat a chain to use to envelope, if i was to like add 3 chain links to the fingers so i can make little movies for fun kinda thing

Like i said, everything can be bones. Use nulls and place them wherever you want, in the hierarchy you want..

thanks for the wiki, helped alot

I'm doing a model of a vehicle (static turret) has a fixed base and a moveable. I need to do a skeleton to move? I like to just move forward and back?. thanks!

if you mean something tanklike, look for Redlines "rotating cannon on a tank"-thread (i think it was called like that)
you dont need bones but nulls for the movingbase if its a turret

know this?:

appears in the movie "the clone wars." This is what I do. the top should only turn on a single axis, that is, forward and back nothing else. You can do that? (I already have the model set up in XSI mod tool)

no, i cant my computer is down
try to do it yourself