Animation of a technical 3ds Polygon Model in A:M?

No problem with “Prop- Objects” and “Roberts Trick”

Look at the video tutorial here

A short description how to do it with a car:

1. Separate your favorite 3ds polygon car in a 3D polygon modeller program into moveable (2 front wheels, back wheels, steering wheel ) and unmoveable parts (body/chassis). There are a lot of free polygon modeller on the market.

2. Import all these parts as Prop-Objects into A:M. Drag and drop the parts into a new choreography.

3. Now Roberts Trick: Create an empty model (call it Car Bones). Go into Bone Mode and create a Skeleton for the moveable parts. Use Side and Top View of your car to position the bones.

4. Drag these Car Bones Model into the Choreography and constrain all the moveable 3ds Prop Objects to the Bones of your Car Bones Skeleton.


Most work is done now! You only have to create a pose for your Care Bones Model to get a fully constrained car.

Drag your A:M object (e.g. seats, characters) into the choreography and constrain it to the Model Bone.

RESTRICTION:

A:M doesn`t like any material at this time e.g. glass and chrome. Delete these materials in your 3D modeller. Since A:M v11 you can apply materials on Prop Objects (Gray Metal from the CD doesn`t work, I don`t know why.)

A:M often doesn’t like reflection materials with environment maps. Delete the images from the material.

If you run in troubles first look at the materials !!!!


Please excuse my bad english.

Nice work around.

Nice job Robert, thank you.

Thanks for compliments.

Look here for another example to combine AM models with Polygon models.

With Prop Objects (thanks to Hash) there are endless possibilities to combine spline and polygon models without import the (terrible ) polygons as dx- or 3ds-files with the high patch density.

Prop objects render fast and the behavier is like mdl files (with some restriction e.g. no alpha rendering is possible and some materials doesn`t work at this time )

Thanks Robert for the tut.. = GREAT job

Excellent tutorial, Robert!!!
At last, somewhere to point all those enquiring minds to.
Thanks!

Robert,
Can you list the "free" polygonal packages you use?

There are so many vehicles available in 3ds format that could be used.

The hangup has always been, to get the wheels to rotate etc.

Would you be interested in converting models for use in AM?

Thanks,
David

I've posted this before, but if you create a new empty model, then right click in the window, pick Wizards/Import/Autodesk 3DS file, it will pull a 3DS file in --as a MODEL, not a prop--and it will be UV mapped to whatever texture files were saved with the 3DS model. It doesn't import bones or materials, just vertices and UV maps. You still have to bone and rig it like you would any other model, but it does work.

I used it to import 3DS conversions of OBJ models from Microsoft's Halo game into A:M, then bone & rig with TSM2. (see MasterChief's helmet in my avatar) No problems.

looks bad Sevenar

Thats works good only for simply lowpoly 3ds model.
Compare both methods with a high poly 3ds model and you will never import 3ds in your way.

"looks bad"? It's IDENTICAL to the game model, save for the color, which I intentionally altered for another project.

At any rate, no multi-million polygon model is ever going to play nice with A:M, regardless of how you try to import it. Might as well take a couple of nice renders in 3D Studio and use them as splining rotoscopes instead if the model is that complex.

Sorry Sevenar, you misunderstood me.

With "looks bad " I did not mean your model, that`s great. What I mean is, it is bad to import a high poly 3ds model with the wizard. It is nearly impossible to get good results in this case. But if you import your 3ds model as a prob object you can handle it and the model renders lightning quick.

Here a comparison of the import with the wizard and as prop object.

Please give props a change , you will like it. But keep an eye on the materials!

Well, I tried it. The same Halo MasterChief model that loads in about 40 seconds in the importer took over three hours to import as a prop. Then, when I tried to go to the shaded preview mode, A:M ate all of my virtual memory before throwing up an unhandled exception error and crashing.

The model's not horribly complex, either. A few thousand polys at most. Looks like it's back to the drawing board for a 3DS solution that's acceptable to everyone.

Not the complexity of the models is the problem, some materials causes crash, mostly reflection materials with environment maps. If you delete the image of the environmentmaps it works.

If you import the whole polygon model as a prop you can not see which of the parts has the bad material.

The best way is to import every part separately as prop object, drag it in the choreography, render, if the rendering needs more than 2 minutes look after the material of the part and change it.

The prop object of the racing car needs 26 sec to render, the 3ds object causes crash.

Hash has a bug report of this material problem and I think if they fix it, it is really great to work with props.

Another problem are rotoscopes and props ìn the choreography and that you can not render props with an alpha buffer.