Exporting your animation
Now that we are done with the setup part, it's time to export our animation. It's time to jump into 3ds max
Animating a CAT Rig is outside the scope of this tutorial. If you want to learn how to do that,
there will be a link to a fantastic Youtube channel at the end of this Tutorial.
First, we have to configure our Timeline, if we haven't done so already. We only want to export the actual
animation, so we want to set our timeline to range from Frame 1 to our last keyframe of our animation.
Then, we use the Animation Export Selection Set to select everything we need to export.
Clicking the set will most likely issue a Warning, that hidden/frozen objects are about to be selected. This
warning can be safely ignored, so press NO to continue.
The relevant Objects for Animation Export are sensitive to changes and as such are frozen,
hidden and mostly secured by constraints by default to prevent any sort of accidental change to them.
With our Jedi Knight Skeleton selected via the Animation Export Selection Set, we can Export our animation.
To do this click File > Export > Export Selected... and export your Animation to your
_humanoid folder as a Softimage dotXSI 3.0 (*.xsi) file.
Name your file appropiately, for this Tutorial I saved my file as
".../JKA-SDK-Repack/base/models/players/_humanoid/both_tutorial.xsi".
When exporting an animation, your main concern is for 3 Settings in the Export Dialog:
- Animation is checked
- File Type is set to ASCII
- Scene Root Name is set to model_root
These should be the default settings, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
If everything went correctly, we should now have succesfully exported our animation.
Compiling the animation from .xsi to .gla
We are almost done. The last step we need to do is setup our gla compile.
Remember the .../source/_humanoid.car file we edited earlier?
It is time to copy that file from /_humanoid/source/ to /_humanoid/ and
open it in our Texteditor.
I would also suggest renaming it to prevent any accidental overwriting of our source .car file.
For this Tutorial I named my file Tutorial.car
What we need to do now, is to add our new .xsi animation to this .car file, to do this we must insert a line
with the following pattern into the .car file:
$aseanimgrab [filename] -loop [loopframe]
In my case, my Animation filename is models/players/_humanoid/both_tutorial.xsi and since
my animation is not meant to loop, I am going to set the loopframe to -1.
If your animation should loop, set the loopframe to the frame that the animation should return to after
being completed. (usually frame 0).
Our new line should now look something like this:
$aseanimgrab models/players/_humanoid/both_tutorial.xsi -loop -1
Last thing left to do before we can compile, is to insert it into the right location in the .car file.
The "right" location, is right above the line
$aseanimgrab models/players/_humanoid/source/root.xsi -loop -1
Which should be the third to last line in our .car file
Now all we need to do is to copy & paste our new line right above the root.xsi line, like so:
...
$aseanimgrab models/players/_humanoid/both_tutorial.xsi -loop -1
$aseanimgrab models/players/_humanoid/source/root.xsi -loop -1
$aseanimgrabfinalize
$aseanimconvertmdx_noask models/players/_humanoid/source/root -makeskel models/players/_humanoid/_humanoid
-origin 0 0 24
...and save our .car file.
With our .car file being finished, it's time to open it in Assimilate.exe.
Once open it will take a short while to load in all of the animation files. Once it has completed that, we
can press the big B Button on the main Toolbar to build our gla.
Shortly after you clicked it, a CMD/DOS Window will open and rush through a lot of lines detailing its work.
If all goes well it will finish and you will be greated by an Info dialog telling you that "Everything
seemed to go ok".
Ideally, you will have a freshly compiled GLA File including your new Animation at Hand. If not there will
be some troubleshooting required. A link to a list of common Assimilate/Carcass Errors and how to fix them
will be at the End of this Tutorial.
