Animation & Key Frames: FSX/P3D

[OleBoy]

Question;

As a rule, when animating, should all animations be collapsed in order for them to work, correctly?
Reason I ask is some of the animations are not working. Mainly the switches on the dash panel.

I know. Try it and see. I'm asking first. :mixedsmi:

[Milton Shupe]

Question;

As a rule, when animating, should all animations be collapsed in order for them to work, correctly?
Reason I ask is some of the animations are not working. Mainly the switches on the dash panel.

I know. Try it and see. I'm asking first. :mixedsmi:

Can't answer the direct question as I am not sure what "collapsing an animation" means since there is nothing added to the stack for animations in FS9.

But I do know that if in FSX you have anything between your point of view and the switch, it will not activate the animation in FS. For example, if you have moved back a little, your POV may be from inside the seat back. You will not know this of course as you can see thru it unless you have moved all the way back behind the seat.

Try moving forward a bit to see if the mouse hand then shows for animation.

[hairyspin]

If an animation has been built in Gmax using animation constraint tools (Path, Look-At, Surface, etc) then it must be Collapsed to keyframes before it will work in FS. But I doubt you need any of these tools to animate switches in the VC: simple keyframe animations are all that's usually needed.

Milton's suggestion is a more likely source of problems, as is scaling gauge polys: see n4gix's sticky at FSDeveloper.

[Tako_Kichi]

As you are fairly new to animation Don make sure all your animations are made with 'linear' parameters in the motion rollout. GMAX defaults to something else but FSX/P3D will only accept linear.

[Milton Shupe]

I am making this thread a sticky for now due to its importance to all gmax/3DS users.

[OleBoy]

I've logged into the forum a couple times since my posting, and forgot to scroll down. Long hours at work.

There aren't a lot of switches on this particular model's panel, but my reason for asking if things needed to be collapsed came due to being in the area in the "motion" tab, trajectories/ collapse transform. I wasn't sure if I've read anything about having to collapse standard-type animations. HS gave me the answer I was needing on that part.

The mag-switch apparently needs a special code due to the way it's animated 3-stage.
Then comes the coding of the individual gauges.

Thanks all for the help. Sounds like it's time to gain a bit of XML knowledge.
The link to n4gix's sticky is great info. Many thanks, Bill. :salute: