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ambient animation at regular intervals

Ripcord

Ripcord

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So I would like to run a simple animation, like a door opening or closing, or an elevator on a ship moving up/down, but I do not want the action to happen continually?

I am using it as an ambient animation in FSX. Not triggered by anything.

Is there a way to 'program' the animation so that it happens periodically? Either by settings in blender or in MCX?

Or do I have to make my 30 second animation action happen within a really long animation time frame?

Example -- I want my door to open (30 seconds), remain open 10 minutes, and then close (30 seconds), but I want this to happen only 1 time per hour -- that is the goal.

Question -- do I need to create an hour long animation time cycle, which just keeps playing over and over in a loop?

Or can I build an 11 or 12 minute cycle that will run periodically?
 
Well I managed to do it as a test -- bascially using method 1, eg., long animation time cycle, which just keeps playing over and over in a loop.

Still small steps leads to ... more small steps. Progress.
 
Guys, somebody that is well versed in animations, I would like to clarify this -- is it accurate to say that ambient animations will continue to run over and over in a loop? Or is there a way to fire them at regular intervals?

Also, is there a time limit for animations? Can I run loops that run for a few hours on end?
 
Hi Ripcord!
My experience with ambient animations, is that they loop indeed. Their length doesn't matter, AFAIK, but I believe there's an upper limit (1024 frames, I read somewhere?).

I used the tag "Ambient" for the head of my D.21 pilot, lasting 300 frames. The thing is just looping.
 
Hi Ripcord,
I think there was a frame limit of 1024 or so in FS2004 animations. With FSX and Prepar3D there is no such limit. Probably it exists but it is much higher.
But the "Ambient" animation is looping as Dutcheeseblend already said.
 
Hi gentlemen, thank you for the info. I am making progress.

Same ship project, similar question. I've got an ambient animation working in Blender, it is a rotating radar. Very nice, looks good in Blender, but for some reason the animation isn't turning when I import it into MCX. MCX does show that there IS an animation in my model, but the thing just doesn't move.

I do have the animation tagged for FSX per the toolset manual ---

--------------------------------------------------

To tag an object, do the following:
  • Keyframe-animate your object. For "Ambient" type animations, the range is defined by you; for aircraft parts, the range is defined in the SDK (example: the rudder would have a range of 0-100 frames, with keyframes at least at 0, 50 and 100).
  • In the list window, scroll down to the animation entry corresponding to the animated part, select it (marked blue) and,
  • With your object selected, click Assign. The object is now tagged with the animation entry. An object can only be tagged with one animation entry!


FSX Properties
You can check which tag has been assigned to the object by going to the "Properties" Panel, object context, FSX Properties rollout: it shows an "Animation Tag" field, a "Length" field which displays the animation range as defined in the modeldef.xml (or 0 in case of "Ambient" type animations; use this to cross-check with your object's animation range) and a Clear button used to untag the object's animation.

-------------------------------------------------

So I am wondering what I might have done wrong.

Am I suppose to indicate somewhere the length of the animation in Blender? I'm not clear on this. I get that it should show zero under FSX Properties, and it does.

Ideas?
 
Hi Ripcord! Do the other animations, if present, work? You might try the very same animation on another object, maybe?
 
No I have just this one animation. Trying it with another ship, having the same issues.
 
That seems to be correct, yes.
If you give a new GUID to the file, or tag the object again, does that help?
 
Let me ask a question -- what does this value mean here, where it says 104:0 ? I understand the zero means Ambient, and 1 means Ambient 2 and so forth, but what is this 104?



In the toolset manual online it shows 7:0 -- is that relevant in any way?
 
What is crazy is that I was successful, just a few weeks ago, in importing one of these SAME SHIPs into MCX and the animations worked. In fact that is what prompted this thread in the beginning.

So just a moment ago, I went back to that blender file, fixed a couple things with the elevator animation, and exported it and shazam! There it is, moving up and down as inteded in MCX. Same ship!

So what changed? All I did to the model itself was remove nearly all the aircraft on deck and moved some of the tugs around on deck. And I fixed the textures (another thread has some helpful discussion on smoothing).

And I tried to animated something different, a rotation animation (radar on the mast) instead of a location animation (the elevator).



So OK now I am looking for clues, what is different here?
 
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jdberg said:
Hi Ripcord,
I think there was a frame limit of 1024 or so in FS2004 animations. With FSX and Prepar3D there is no such limit. Probably it exists but it is much higher.
But the "Ambient" animation is looping as Dutcheeseblend already said.
Click to expand...

By the way, MCX had no issues at all with an animation that is 2500 frames long. Still need to test that in P3D.
 
104:0 is just a thing that belongs to the list of animations. You don't need to do anything with it.
 
I see.

The other file with working animations, the elevator, does not show that dual number with the colon -- it just shows zero there. Probably just coincidence.
 
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Right..... I started type a response like of course I did that, do you think I am stupid?.... then I doubled checked....

homer-simpson-doh.jpg


OK so what I will do now is go back to my working version, with the working elevators and see if I can add my rotating radar animation to THAT file.
 
Also this might be a good time to once again say thanks for all your assistance and patience. I am learning something, ever so slowly....
 
Hmmm, still didn't work. The rotation animation is still not happening, but the location animation seems to work fine.
 
You're welcome ;)

Can you try to just add a box to the scene, give it the material and the give it the very same animation?
 
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