Newbie - animating aircraft parts

[Thunder]

Hi, I'm trying to understand how to make animations, but so far no success...talking about FS9 sdk, how am I supposed to export animations? Is there a plugin or something?
The sdk SUCKS, it has a list with a kazillion animation names, but what am I supposed to do with those? Is there an xml file to write or something?

FSX: I open the animation manager, select the object I wan to animate, set start and end frames, and elevator percent key, I click create (the one next to delete). Now what? when I export the model it creates an *.xanim file, I know there's something about it somewhere in the sdk...

well any help is appreciated, and yes, my brain is melting....

[pepper_airborne]

Lets say you want to animate the gear, then you put it in its up postion and lock a keyframe, then you put it in its down postion and keyframe it, and then you name it Gear_L or something similair to that.

Here is a tutorial concerning the gear.

http://www.simviation.com/gryphon/tutor ... _07.htm#7c

[Thunder]

Thanks, I'm reading the tutorial and will try something later on

[Thunder]

I've been able to animate almost everything with stock animations!!! Now I'm learning keyframe animation...BTW, how can I modify an animation to make it more complex (eg. animating elevons, or canards that maintain a 0 deg AoA etc)?

Thanks in advance

[Katahu]

Here are some rules you need to follow whenever you do get the hang of keyframing.

All keyframed objects are noted with an asterik [*] and the names "interior" and "exterior" will be the base nodes if using either the heirarchy export or group export method:

[What's allowed by Makemdl]

Exterior
> Object01
> C_Gear_Top*
> > C_Gear_Bottom*
> > > Rudder01
> Lever_Stick_Fore_Aft*
> > Lever_Stick_l_r*

Exterior
> L_Gear_Top*
> > L_Gear_Bottom*
> > > L_Tire_Still
> > Object01

[What isn't allowed by Makemdl]

Exterior
> L_Gear_Top*
> > L_Gear_Bottom*
> > > L_Tire_Still
> > L_Gear_Bottom_01*
> > > L_Gear_Bottom_02*

If you notice, you don't want your key-frames to branch out into two other key-frames; however, it's ok to have one key-frame branch out with non-key-framed objects on one branch and key-framed-ones on the other branch. Over all, the key to linking animations is to simply keep the key-frames linked in a SINGLE line.

[Thunder]

Thanks for the info, will keep that in mind. BTW, can I use a helper for the exterior and inerior nodes?

Anyway, the things you explained are useful for linking objets, but how can I make a single object have different animations, or act in a certain way that I define? If for example I want to make an elevon, how can I tell the sim that the same object is both an elevator and an aileron and "mix" the two movements?

[Felix/FFDS]

AVOID using a "helper"  object.  IT is better if your interior and exterior nodes are small boxes correctly oriented and placed at themodel's 0,0,0 point!