Animated Dynamic Tower?

[Jonathan]

I was wondering if it it would be possible to create a dynamic tower for SC4 that was actually dynamic:


I'm not sure but I think there are two kinds of animation in SC4, one done like with the BAB tool and one like the Ferris wheel by maxis. Would it be possible using either of them to create a dynamic tower?

Jonathan

[thingfishs]

simgoober had that building (disco or restaurant or something) with the two simultaneously spinning decks atop each other. Could it be done like that but on a larger scale?

[nerdly_dood]

I'll warn you, if you want to create a True3D animated model for SC4 (like the ferris wheel I think), it's amazingly tedious - you've got to have all the locations for every vertex in the model listed for each frame... so even for simpler models like a rotating light on a police car, it's very boring and time-consuming... but the result is impressive.

I don't know anything about the BAB mentioned above, so I can't compare them.

[Jonathan]

could you not export the model several times and copy and paste the locations of all the vertexs in?

[cogeo]

Animations made with the method utilised in BAB has size limitations, the model can be about one tile (16x16) large. I have released a pack of solar panels, and I had to make tricks to keep it from clipping parts of the model. Now there's another method (for making animations), but I have no idea about it.

[nerdly_dood]

could you not export the model several times and copy and paste the locations of all the vertexs in?

Oh, well now you're just cheating! Still, that's tedious and time-consuming.

[xxdita]

could you not export the model several times and copy and paste the locations of all the vertexs in?

What would be the difference between doing this and making a timed prop, with 4 or 5 rotations of the building?

[nerdly_dood]

A timed prop is dependent on the in-game time, and it's not good for animations that appear to be smoothly moving. True3D animations, on the other hand, can give the appearance of motion, which is part of why they're used with automata.

[Jonathan]

can True3D animations change the texture?

[nerdly_dood]

Each individual part can be assigned a material in the Anim tab in Reader - meaning, each part of the model for each frame - so the Anim tab can be quite packed with stuff, mostly for models that use multiple textures, or for animated models. My vehicle models mostly have 4 materials - the shadow, the undercarriage, the main car body, and the lightbar - and the light effects for them either have 2 materials - one for the left rotating light and one for the right - or five - two for the left strobes, two for the right, and one transparent texture for when the light isn't shining.

I'm considering ways to do the animation by way of texturing rather than modeling, so that each frame has the same model, but uses different parts of the same texture (with texture size limited to 256x256, this decreases the amount of detail possible) or multiple textures (which would be inefficient for file size) - if you do any True3D modeling you should know how to do UV maps, which is how a texture is "wrapped" around a model so that it shows up properly.

[Jonathan]

In that case couldn't the building be rendered for each frame normally (not True 3D) and the texture gives the effect it is moving.

Are the AVP ATC (or soemthing like that) files to do with this type of animation?

[nerdly_dood]

I wouldn't know about AVP ATC (not that I know what it is...), but you'd need to modify and re-render the building once for each frame, and add all the textures to all the frames to the DAT file, and make sure that each frame is properly assigned its proper texture in the Anim tab, which will make it very time-consuming, tedious, not to mention making the filesize utterly massive.

[Jonathan]

Can BATs even be animated in this way?
What defines if a section in the ANIM tab is a frame or a part of the model?

[nerdly_dood]

As for the first part of your question, I'm pretty sure that it is possible, although it won't be easy.

As for the second part, I don't know how to properly define it - but take this ambulance model of mine for example:


The lights all around the top, as indicated below, used to be separate parts, each of which had a separate box in the Anim tab. I selected one of them, clicked "Convert to Editable Mesh", and then clicked "Attach", and selected all the other lights - now they all are a single box in the Anim tab, which is good since they all use the same texture.


Now it's a lot simpler to match up all the parts of the model to its proper texture in the Anim tab.

Anyway.... to answer your question...I'm not sure.

In the Anim tab, each part is matched up to a vertex block, an index block, a prim block, and a mat block. The index block and the prim block don't seem to be important, as they're always set to 0, so I don't know what they do.  The "mat block" section is where you specify which material that part uses, and it can only use a single material at a time.  The "vert block" is used to specify which vertex block the part uses. The vertex blocks are listed in the "Vert" tab, with the location of each vertex in the model and its UV coordinates (to match up with the texture) listed under each vertex block heading. As far as I can tell, parts of a single frame are treated the same as parts of separate frames in the Vert tab, so if it's an animation there will be one vertex block for each part of the model for each frame. So for one of my rotating light effects, there are two parts - one pair of rotating triangles on the left, usually using the red rotating-light texture, and one pair on the right, usually using the blue rotating-light texture - and 24 frames, so that makes 48 vertex blocks. Vertex blocks 0 through 23 are for the right-hand light, and 24 through 47 are for the left-hand light, so be warned that the indicated number of the last vertex block is one less than the total number of vertex blocks.

I hope that helps...