Animations in Game

[Darquelord]

I have exported my Character and animation from Maya. In the Anim set Viewer I made a new Anim set for my character and added psa file. The animation plays fine. I closed the viewer and saved the skeletal mesh. I added mesh to my level and did a build. Now no animation shows up when I run the game... Do I need to attach some sort of script to this character to get animations to play? Please help, DL out.

[Nawrot]

CTF-Strident in UT3 has animated skeletal meshes. Generally you need to create matinee and use it to control your mesh.

[Darquelord]

Im Completely new to UT3 so that pretty much just went right over my head. What is matinee and where do I find it? DL out

[Denny]

You need to fill in these areas for it to work. This only works with one animation per mesh, if you want to go deeper you need to mess with Matinée like Nawrot suggested. Matinée is pretty complex so it isn't something you can easily explain. :)

http://forums.epicgames.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=344&stc=1&d=1258476898

[Darquelord]

I set my actor up this exact way but still no animations. The character is a test model for an actual player model and I need to know how to set all this up. Please advise on where to get started with Matinee. Thanks!

[Denny]

That should work perfectly, you're typing something wrong.

[Darquelord]

As far as I can tell Im not typing anything wrong. Anyway Its not playing and I am trying to learn to get this working through Matinee. Unless Im missing something what you showed me will not play the animations. Thanks!

[micahpharoh]

You can try out my matinee tutorials, but I haven't gone over custom anims yet.

[Darquelord]

Thanks MicahPharoh. I was able to follow your vids and I can see the animations in the viewport. In the properties of the actor I assigned interpolating under the physics. I now get an error on build saying... "Skeletal mesh actor cast shadow but has no physical asset assigned"

I am now looking to fixing this. Any help is appreciated... I have an Idle set to looping.. so now my question is will this play if I run the level in the viewport? Lemme know if theres more to this.. Thanks! DL out

[Darquelord]

Tried to assign Physic object and Im not really sure about that. Animations play with Matinee in the viewport but not when running the game. I assume I need to do some scripting? DL out.

[Denny]

The Physical Asset is used for shadow rendering optimization, bounding box generation, hit detection and similar. It's always recommended to have one on a character.

[Darquelord]

Yeah I figured that about a physics asset but my question would be now if I wanted to run the game and watch this player do an animation would I need a script to tell it to play animations or is it suppose to do it on its own? Please advise... DL out.

[micahpharoh]

Go into kismet where you made your matinee sequence. You need to set something to trigger the sequence, even if it's just level startup. Right click and look at the New Event menu. There should be something in there that would be useful.

[Darquelord]

That did it! Now I can see the guy doing an animation. Thanks to all for the help!

[eosteric]

I'm trying to make a new player character, I model in silo, do details in zbrush, and rig/animate in max. should I use actorx to export it all, and should I make normalmap from zbrush and import into max or?

haven't made models and animation for games before so unsure about the process, what type of rigging do I use?

[micahpharoh]

Good. I'm glad to have helped.

[micahpharoh]

I'm trying to make a new player character, I model in silo, do details in zbrush, and rig/animate in max. should I use actorx to export it all, and should I make normalmap from zbrush and import into max or?

haven't made models and animation for games before so unsure about the process, what type of rigging do I use?

First of all, you really shouldn't just throw questions like that into a random thread, but I'll answer your questions.

Get all your stuff into 3ds Max (or Maya) and export it as a .psk with ActorX. If you make the normal map in zbrush then there is no real reason to bring it into max. You can just bring it directly into the UDK.