FSDS Scenery keyframe animation FS9

[jgowing]

I'd made a wind turbine and now I want to animate it in FS9 using tick animation, simple enough but I hadn't done it before. FSDS 3.5 help points me to scenery keyframe animations in the browse dropdown list, but scenery keyframe animations aren't on that list in the program, just stock animations. Feeling a bit confused as I know many many people have used these.. what am I doing wrong?

Thanks for any thoughts,

Jon G

[MIKE JG]

You're not doing anything wrong, just the help with FSDS isn't that great. What they don't tell you in the FSDS info is that much of what you need to know about using animations and just stuff in general as it relates to designing scenery or models for Flight Simulator, can be found in the various SDK documents that the Aces team originally released for developers way back in the day. If you haven't read through the MakeMdl SDK and related docs, give that a read. I wish I had done that and that someone had directed me to do that before I started monkeying around with scenery and aircraft design, I would have saved myself a lot of headaches.

Fortunately tick18 keyframe animation is pretty straight forward. The maximum number of keyframes you can program is 1024. So 1024/18 = 56.8 which means that the maximum length of any single animation sequence can only be approximately 56 seconds. So for your project you will want to figure out how fast or slow you want the blades of the windmill to rotate to complete one rotation. That figure will determine how you assign the keyframes to the actual part inside FSDS.

One thing to remember is that you always want your part to start and stop at the same spot on the first key frame and last keyframe, also remember that tick18 animations run continuously.

The hard part is figuring out how to make your part so that you only have to animate the fewest amount of parts possible. In your case, you could simply animate just the blade hub itself and either join the actual blades to the hub to make one part or make the blades child parts of the hub so that anything that the hub does, the blade does.

To make a part rotate a complete 360*, I believe you need a minimum of four assigned keyframes. One for the starting position, two to establish the direction of rotation and a final one to establish the ending position of the part.

So again for your hub part, KF0 would the starting position of the animation. The next two keyframes tell the sim how to rotate the hub. So rotate the hub 120* and assign it a keyframe. Rotate it another 120* in the same direction and assign that a keyframe using the same number of frames between each one. Finally rotate the part another 120* which will bring it back to the starting position and assign that your final keyframe. That gets the part back home where it will immediately start the animation sequence over giving the illusion that the part is in continuous motion.

Experiment with the spacing of the keyframes. You do not have to start at keyframe 0 or end at keyframe 1024. You can use any start or stop point in between that you like for scenery animation. Most of us just start at 0 to make the math easy.

So start at KF0, set the keyframe, then advance the keyframe counter (in animation mode) to say 200 and repeat for the other positions. Save the model and import it into the sim and test.

Rinse and repeat until you get it looking just the way you want it to.

I hope that helps.

[jgowing]

Thanks Mike for that encouraging reply; I'll dive in tonight and give it a go.

Jon G

[jgowing]

Mike,

I'm making progress; the blade/hub assembly rotates about the Z axis. I wanted a complete rotation in around 5 seconds, so I set keyframes at 0, 33, 66 and 99, rotating -120 degrees each time. The list of Z rotations is accordingly 0, -120, 120 and 0; so far so good, assuming the negative and positive integers are a convention left and right of the centreline.

Now the problem; the direction of rotation reverses at each keyframe when I view the bgl in MCX.

I'm nearly there; I'd be so grateful if you could just help me get over the line..

Jon G

[MIKE JG]

Jon it looks fine in game.



MCX and other proggys like ModelTweeker don't always display animated model objects correctly so the only real way to tell is to test the object in the sim.

The rotation looks good and the speed also looks ok to me.

I didn't even do anything to your model file other than compile it and place it in game.

A little bit of texturing to make it look more realistic with shading and depth and you'll be all set.

[jgowing]

Thanks Mike; good to know I was on the right lines. I was using the MCX animation viewer "to save time", but in future I'll rely on the acid test of the sim. Thanks for the tip.

All the best,

Jon G

[MIKE JG]

Glad to help.

Now the real fun comes when you try to add features to it in ModelTweeker. Things like rotate to wind, etc.

Just remember that once you have a .mdl file for it, you can try all sorts of tweaks post creation. Some work, some don't. In FS9 to add night lighting (obstacle lighting) you have to add those effects separately as their own scenery file and just match up the position of the light effect with the 3D position of the actual model itself. Good times!