Xsi animation help Created 16 years ago2008-05-11 06:28:40 UTC by Instant Mix

I'm going to start animating in XSI , But with the tutorials , I only saw bones / envelops that moved like a ballsocket.
Is there anything that will make a ploygon Move up and down , Left or right , Without a ballsocket thing
( Like a cylinder rises from the ground )

Help really appreciated

ps. Christ , Haven't been here in ages.

To do that, you need to "key" your animations. General keying doesn't involve any rigging at all. To make a cylinder rise from the ground, select the object you want to move. Make sure it's at it's default un-risen position. After, hit v or click onto the translate tool with your object selected. A red key should appear down under the frame timeline somewhere. Click it. After, move the timeline slider to another frame. Then, move your cylinder to it's final position. With it still selected, key it again at the different frame in the final position. Then, XSI should automatically tween the movement together, and it will move automatically whilst scrolling through your frames. It works the same with scaling and rotating as well.

(tell me if that needs clarifying)

Why thank you , Grim Reafer.
I hope it goddamn works

By the way , It's for making buildup animations and buildown for a C&C Gmod mod.

Ok , need help.
Compiled it and bits are different sizes , different places and the animations don't work.

Just to avoid any future confusion, for animations to work in Source, the meshes must be enveloped to bones. You can't key the meshes themselves and have the animations come out properly in-game. To do the same thing with a bone, just create a single root null with no effectors and envelope the entire mesh to it. Then all you need to do is move the null around as you would the mesh and key it at the right points and you'll have an animation that will function correctly in Source.

Ahh thanks, I was having this problem.
Null ; you mean the root of a chain , or that NULL object thing in the selection.
Basically the selection which you can choose between tori and cubes etc.

The null I was talking about is the bit that the bone itself rotates around (while the effector is what is causing the bone to rotate). If you just click once with the bone tool, all you'll make is a null; no bone, and no effector. You can rig the model to that null and use it to animate things if you don't need complex bone chains to do whatever animation you're making.