Adding a Death Animation

[DiggetyBo]

Hey,

I was looking across the forums and tutorials, but couldn't find anything that addressed my current bump in the road, so I'll make a new thread in case anyone else has this problem.

I made a model, it's very simple, just a spinning rock, (animation string: stand). I made this without any animation software, I just edited x,y,z coordinate triplets on the models .mdl file via notepad. Problem is I'm not sure how to properly create a death animation. My current death animation is just supposed to be like 3 brief frames of the model's animation sequence -- I was hoping this would create a cheap and dirty death animation, because I thought it would look like it disappeared, like in the blink of an eye it exploded or something (as 3 frames is very brief, right?) However, it has this terrible habit of standing around awkwardly for 5+ seconds before it disappears when it 'dies' in game. I even checked non-looping in magos model editor.

Has anyone else encountered a situation like this before?

Ideally, I want the rock to explode, and if anyone knows how I could rope in some in-game textures, like building explosion as part of its death animation, that would be so epic and more classy.

Thank you!

 

[DiggetyBo]

Ok,

I'm going to shamelessly answer my own question for all to see.

I messed around with it for another 2 hours. Afterwards, I learned the problem for the awkward animation upon death is because some very impoverished models do not have Geoset Scaling -- this can also be toggled via notepad. It goes after Geoset Rotation. My approach doesn't look very professional. (ideally it could explode or get progressively smaller). This model is just a little detail, it's not a huge part of my game, so that's why I'm cool with sacrificing some quality in order to get things 100% functional (which at least is the case now).

Here is what my sample solution looked like:

Bone "Bone_0" {
ObjectId 0,
Rotation 5 {
Linear,
0: { 0, 0, 0, 1 },
187: { 0, 0.707107, 0, 0.707107 },
400: { 0, -1, 0, 0 },
587: { 0, -0.707092, 0, 0.707122 },
800: { 0, 0, 0, 1 },
}
Scaling 10 {
Linear,
0: { 1, 1, 1 },
187: { 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000 },
400: { 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000 },
587: { 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000 },
800: { 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000 },
810: { 0.300000, 0.300000, 0.300000 },
820: { 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000 },

Note how the last few frames the scale goes to 0. That's the key. I suppose this could also be done through magos editor, but in this case I think magos' interface is not suited for this type of model editing, it's much quicker via notepad.

So, there you are. 42 ppl viewed this, so hopefully this amuses somebody.

Too bad I can't give rep to myself, this is the first time I've ever considered giving rep to myself, but I guess it's not in the cards.