[SOLVED] MDL export truncates animation?

[pierrot]

Hi, here's a problem I'm facing today (never noticed before).

I have modelled in Gmax a small windmill, into which 2 animations are baked:
- one is the rotor spinning endless
- the second one mimics an erratic small change of orientation, as if the wind heading was changing slightly from time to time.

This second animation is cyclic, too, but when seen together with the rotor spinning my model seems rather realistic in FSX/P3D.

Now, I'd like to make my windmill even more realistic by triggering its heading with SODE. So here's what I did :
1 import the MDL into MCX (Eol_9m_Signal)
2 with the hierarchy tool, removed everything but the pole and exported it as a new model (Eol_9m_Signal_Mat)
3 again, imported the full model into MCX
4 with the hierarchy tool, removed the pole to keep only the generator, the rotor, and animations and exported this "head" as a new model (Eol_9m_Signal_Nacelle).

Now I have 2 models, a pole and a head, and I put them into SODE and fire the sim up.

Everything is OK, the head turns according to the wind direction, and the small hesitating erratic heading variation is kept.

BUT: the rotor spins only 1 rotation and stops. The rest of the erratic orientation continues till its normal end, then the animation loops to the beginning, my rotor spins again but just 1 time and stops, while the hesitating heading movement continues, etc etc.

How is it that from 2 animations 1 is exported OK in the partial MDL, and not the second one?
What do I do wrong?

Btw. I noticed during this experience that, when I import my full model and play the animations in MCX, I can see the full sequence or animation #2 (erratic change of heading) but animation #1 plays only 1 time.

How to do to be able to import the full working Gmax MDL, and cut it into 2 working re-usable parts?

 

[=rk=]

You have made your erratic animation 300 frames long while your rotation in only 9 frames. You can play it through frame by frame in MCX and because you have made the erratic animation so long, the rotation animation has to pause for 291 frames before it can return to frame 0. Make all your ambient animations have the same number of frames and they will repeat seamlessly.

 

[pierrot]

Thanks RK, you may be right, but FSX/P3D display the fully animated model correctly.
I do not understand why MCX changes things (and what it does) to make exported parts not fully animated any more.
So it means I can't easily "downgrade" my windmill, I must go back to Gmax and tweak the spinning animation to make it as long as the other one?
Or is there any mean to do that in MCX?

 

[=rk=]

You can confirm my assertion by observing your model in the SODE environment. When the rotor stops, count the frames until 291 have passed and see if the blades rotate again. If they do, then you will have to use a key frame editor to truncate the long animation or add to the rotation animation. If you are really good at parsing XML, you may be able to find the rotation animation and then you could possibly "hack" that section to have 33 more instances - I have seen similar things done with other animated models. If you were successful, you would have a nearly imperceptible 3 frame pause as the end of the animations loop.

 

[pierrot]

Thanks Rick, I cheered up myself a lot (since I didn't use it for at least 2 years) and fired up Gmax again. I had forgotten almost everything about it, but not everything. I remember enough to see that all my rotation ticks were already there, the full 300 frames long. And enough to make an update inside the animation tool and then export my FSX MDL including animation.

So, it seems that Alzhzeimer didn't got me completely, after all. Everything had been done but I probably forgot to update the animation after the last tweaking, when I made this model so long ago.

So I put this updated MDL in my scenery tonight and... tadaa! it works like a charm. And it also works with its combined animation in MCX, now.

What I still do not understand is why the "bad" model worked perfectly as a scenery object and revealed its flaw only in MCX or when used as a Simobject (by SODE). Weird...
Its behaviour was perfect in the sim, so I couldn't suspect the MDL was not.

Thanks again for pointing my mistake and show me the way to solve the problem.

ps: Attached is the corrected MDL

 

[=rk=]

Yes, glad to help, model looks good by the way.

 

[arno]

Hi,

Inside MCX all animations are linked to the timer shown in the toolbar. So it's normal in the tool that a shorter animation will stop while others are still running.

But that after export the sim also behaves like that sounds like a bug. I'll check if the animations are maybe accidentally grouped on export or so. Do you have a simple mdl for me to test with?

 

[pierrot]

Yes Arno,
from the first 3 ones I uploaded in my initial post, the Eol_9m_Signal.mdl performs OK in FSX and P3D2. When I cut it into the 2 following parts (static Eol_9m_Signal_Mat and animated Eol_9m_Signal_Nacelle) then the animated part (Nacelle) performs wrong. My corrected model is enclosed just 2 posts before yours.

 

[arno]

Thanks, I'll have a look.