Simple animation in blender

[donnato]

Ok so i imported the only Daedric heart object I could find which is a clutter item, into blender with the intention of making it beat. It of course has collision and will need it when I`m done. My question is...while I`m scaling up and down adding the keyframes...should I just have both items (heart mresh and collision) selected all through the process? Or should I just move the collision to another layer...do my animating...then just add it back before export.

Another question just ocurred to me...texture first? Or animate-export and assign texture later in nifskope..?

[Hanaisse]

I would move the collision out of the way, just work on the model. Also wouldn't worry about texture unless you decide to re-do the UV map or something.

[donnato]

Ah thank you Hana...I do noit want to change the mapping and I figured that getting the collision out of the way would be ok...

[washington]

Select Collision... Then shift-select heart and press ctrl+P. That way you'll parent the collision to heart and whatever you do to heart, you'll do it to collision too.

[donnato]

Oh cool, thanks Washington, I just didn`t know if parenting/animating both together would save/export properly. I`ll probably dupe both to a coupe other layers and experiment with both ways.

[washington]

Just don't forget that if you parent your collision to mesh and move it to other layer it will be exported when you export mesh even though it's not selected and in different layer. To un-parent something use Alt+P iirc.

[donnato]

Thanks this is good to know. However after trying it I`m not really happy with the results of simply altering the entire mesh repeatedly..looks silly actually. What I`m doing now is placing an armature or two inside and behind the areas I want to move, and rigging them to those vert groups. This works pretty cool and I just now have to get the placements and (more difficult) the timings dialed in. Then I will have a heart where just the "chamber" sections will "beat". Never done this before so it`s taking me quite a bit of trial and error to find the proper settings and such. If I get a working model I`ll try to get a quick vid and post a link here.

[donnato]

Ok it seems to me that if I`m going to have two bones, affecting two different areas of the same mesh I need to learn how to assign vert groups to the corresponding bones...tutorial anyone?...Please..>>

[WindmillTilter]

I'm still sadly ignorant of Blender, but I don't believe there were major GUI changes between 2.42 and 2.49 (I'm assuming you're running 2.49). If that's the case This Tutorial might be useful to you.

WT

[donnato]

Thank you Wind, I have seen that one and have it saved so I can refer back to it. I tried early on to make a simple armature woth a bone at each end to modify two corresponding areas of the same mesh. I`m having trouble assigning vert groups to each bone and have them pose independantly of one another each affecting only the group assigned to it. If this were a model with appendages such as arms and/or legs it would be much easier methinks...