Milkshape3D Tutorial 1.4

Part 3.4 - Adding animations:

Our actor would quite be a boring thing inside our level without some cool animations attached to it. To prepare some, open the 'Skeleton'-register again and have a look at the top part of it:

Make sure, that 'Show Skeleton' is activated and 'Preview Mode' pressed to choose bones from the skeleton and to see modifications in realtime.

I must admit I still have no idea how to get the model into my Genesis3D- level, that would be the next chapter...*shrug*. I fear without programming you're only able to replace existing actors like the girl, 'dema.act' inside the actors-directory of Genesis3D. But I don't know. For that reason I'll name the animations like the animations of 'dema.act': Die, Hit, Idle, Run and Walk. Let's start.

Click 'New' inside the 'Animation'-area. It could be helpful to use 'Rotate' at the 'key-bones' like 'chestleft' to move the entire arm up and down. So I let Blockhead stand a bit more cool:

Then rename it to your likes (or the names mentioned above) and enter a value inside the frame-counter (default 30 there). I took 15 for my 'Idle'-animation. The next part is totally up to your imagination, you can move or rotate every bone inside every window (except 3D). It's often useful to 'Copy Keys' before switching to the next frame to be able to paste 'em to the next frame. Else the modell would slip back into the starting-position. Now look at this new member of the NWO:

Hey, who's laughing out there?! I got problems with the arms. I made the mistake to move the arms before starting a new animation, so I had to re-adjust the extremities what caused some distortions. The next chapter will show, how to add the new actor to an existing level (perhaps the Actor Studio is the key to that...*shrug*).

Note: To test the actor in G3D, you should create the other animations mentioned above and export the actor as *.act-file. WARNING: Don't export it directly into the 'actors'-folder. I don't know why, but doing so my actor lost its skin and was only about 22k. Then I exported to root and copied it into 'actors', all fine (70k). First save the 'dema.act' by copying it to somewhere else, then rename your actor to 'dema.act' and copy it to the actors-folder. If you start your level now, you are inside of your actors body (hope you got a mirror attached somewhere). You could place a 'BotActorStart'-entity somewhere to battle it too.