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Problem with animations...

M

Michael2

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ca-britishcolumbia
I am having problems with animating an object that is the child of another animated object. The parent and child have different animation tags.

Specifically, I am trying to animate an elevator that is the child of a stabilizer. The whole stabilizer rotates to reflect elevator trim. The elevator is the child of the stabilizer and is animated with elevator_percent_key. When exported to FSX the elevator is animated oddly. I have tried everything I can think of for two days to make it work. If I unlink the elevator from the animated stabilizer it animates properly, so it definitely the parenting that is causing the problem. It wasn't a problem in GMax.

On the other hand, I have numerous linked animations in the landing gear using different tags, so I can't see why it should work with the elevator and stabilizer.
 
Last edited:
Hi Michael2!
Have you made sure to check and see if all animated objects have a scale of 1.0. And also make sure that all of your animated objects have their rotations set to default for the first key frame of the animation. If not you can have problems with animations in FSX.

I hope this helps!

Kris:)
 
All objects are scaled to 1.0. Kris, I am not sure what you mean by having rotations set to default. All my animated objects are aligned so as to rotate around one of their local axes.
 
When the stick or yoke is pressed fully forward, the elevators move forwards in addition to rotating down.
 
Michael2 said:
All objects are scaled to 1.0. Kris, I am not sure what you mean by having rotations set to default. All my animated objects are aligned so as to rotate around one of their local axes.
Click to expand...
Hi Michael2!

I am sorry, I should of said to make sure that all rotations are set to (y:0,x:0,z:0) (ctrl + a) at the neutral positions before starting animations. I have found if I do not make sure to do this that animations will move strangle in FSX.

Below are some images showing what I mean.

upload_2015-6-24_12-28-54.png


Let me know if you still do not understand.

Kris:)
 

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Thanks for the clarification. I have set up some simple objects aligned with the global axes to experiment with and it makes no difference. I any event, it would be exceedingly difficult to set up all the animations along global axes and then rotate the parts into their proper orientations. And in any event, the animations are fine until one animated part is linked to another. The child part reaches the end of its rotation as it should and then begins a small linear slide out of position.

I have set up many, many animations along custom orientations without difficulty so long as I use either quatemion rotations or change the Euler order so that the animated axis is listed first. I think it must be some issue with the exporter. I am still trying to find some work around.
 
It works correctly in Blender. I thought at first it was on account of there being the two different tags, but it happens even if I give each part the same tag. I have a very similar set up with the flaps -- there is a section of the one flap that rotates up as the main flap comes down to get out of the jet blast of one of the engines, and that works perfectly. The only obvious difference is the flaps animate in the same direction from 0 to 100, whereas with the other control surfaces 50 is the midpoint and the animation work in the sim in opposite directions from that midpoint. The trouble occurs in the sim going from 50 to 0. It gets to 0 well before the stick is all the way forward and then the elevator slides forwards or backwards depending on how the axes are set up (I've tried a few ways). I am going to try to set up the elevators by hand using both location and rotation animations without having the parts linked. That should be OK, but I expect pretty time consuming.
 
I am using elevator_percent_key. I have tried using unrelated tags to see if it made any difference and the same problem persisted.
 
I'm having no problems on my T.5 interior model (as far as I can discover...) but only on the rigged/boned parts. One bone, tagged, keyed, just refuses to do it's animation.
...
Not yet able to reproduce it...
 
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