Simviation Forums

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....

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

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

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

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.

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?

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!