velociostrich wrote:gavlig, I might like to discuss what work I did on the acid tube with you and explain what I was trying to accomplish on IRC in more detail. Yes, scaling is not supported, and the trick I was trying to employ to get around said fact was to weight the ends of the tubes to bones and move and rotate those bones. With the base of the tubes weighted to a "root" bone, the ends would flail about while the bases remained motionless.
Ok, i'm ready to discuss it whenever you are :) We could even use skype for that purpose.
`Ishq told me that you noticed that all (actually, not all but most) of the bones are root bones. This was necessary as child bones cannot be moved (as far as I know) relative to their parent, and so this was the only way to pull off the trick I just described.
Actually, you can move children relatively to their parents(or parent, in our case) or, maybe, i didn't get your point here.
By the way, I did a fair amount of experimenting in-game with different animation tricks, and some of my test files are on Dropbox (somewhere; it's been a while since I worked on it). In doing so, I noticed some odd behavior: as an example, I seem to recall that modelScale was not scaling the keyframe positions of bones, so if a bone moved from (0,0,0) to (0,0,1), setting modelScale to 2 would yield no difference in the change in z-position. I can't recall what some of the other odd behaviors I noticed were.
Not sure about that odd behavior, i need to see it :) I'd love to see your experiments, so i'm gonna look for them now
If you're going to try a radically different way of animating the model--specifically, redoing the rig and weighting--just please make a copy of my effort in case it proves to be the more feasible approach.
Of course, i'll make a backup copy, it's not even worth of mentioning(some bad experience has tought me to make backups on every single new change i make. I don't always do them though :D).
You're a far more proficient animator than I, and I'm sure you already have ideas for alternate ways of animating the model, but I just wanted to let you know what I found.
That's a matter of discussion, because before unv i've rigged and animated only one model and i don't like it now anyways :)