Animation Snapshots

Support Animation and Rigging
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You can skip this first section if you want:

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I’ve been working with certain versions of Unreal Engine 1 for a while now. For any rare developer who has experience with the old engine, one might be aware that newer versions supported skeletal animation, and then there’s vertex animation. This is the tricky bit. Now, in most cases, using skeletal animation would be the best alternative, especially with Blender’s exceptional animation tools. This I have no problem with. I’ve already used it many times.

The problem arises from the fact that the particular mod I’m building this particular model for is targeted for all versions of the original game, Unreal, and in this case, skeletal meshes are not supported.

So that’s my situation. As of yet, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I do believe that this will be workable, but I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, and I’m essentially in need of some help if I want to get this model to a point where I can get it into the game.
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The first thing I tried was to take a simple cube, do a simple UV-unwrap, then put together two animations for testing. Done. I can also show off the progress on the cube, where the weapon model will be kept out of the discussion from now on (it’s currently a WIP weapon, so we’re not showing it off yet).

Now I’m stuck. I’ve started to painstakingly move duplicates of the cube and armature to separate layers, then to go to a certain frame, apply the pose, remove the armature, then rename the cube object. This will get me what I want, but it will take time. What most modelers have done is this: using a simple feature in 3DS Max, they’ve taken skeletal-animated meshes and “snapshotted” each frame into a different object, each named with a 0…000, 0…001, 0…002, etc. extension. This is the final outcome of what I’ve been trying, except instead of having it done with a few clicks, it’s going to take me quite some time with this cube, and much more time for a fully-animated weapon.

So I’m curious if there’s any other way to achieve the same effect in Blender, or if there’s some trick to go about doing this easily and efficiently. I may be forced into doing it the slow and painful way, but let me know if there’s some better way to do it, and you’ll be saving my quite a lot of redundant work. Thanks in advance.

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I’ve been hammering out the animations for this model in Blender, so I’ve had something to do, but I return to this thread at the end of my work, because this still needs to be sorted out. My goal should, it seems, be to make separate .blend files, each with objects within them labled OBJ00 to OBJ91 or whatever the frame limit may be for each animation, and then I need to export them to .3ds files. The problem I’m facing is that Blender lacks a dedicated snapshotting tool, although I’m personally trying out my own methods to work through this problem. If somebody can make a script of some sort that can do this, I’d be incredibly pleased, but in an effort not to be too naive, I’ll proceed by explaining what I’m attempting at the current time:

I exported the model in the Wavefront .obj format. The important thing to note is that I exported with the animation checkbox marked off, so each frame is its own individual file. This had me excited for a short moment, but then there’s the problem with re-importing these back in as individual objects. Blender’s .obj importer doesn’t seem to be too keen on importing multiple .obj files at a time, regardless of your ability to select multiples in the importer. I’ve read that all of the models are imported into separate scenes, but after doing an apparently successful import, I checked in the scene list on the top bar and found only the default scene listed, leading me to believe that only the active selected file was imported, and the other files were ignored.

This is annoying, to say the least. That said, I’m a step closer to my goal. I could, if I was stupid enough, go about importing each .obj frame file for every animation manually, but then again, that begs the question of whether or not this all should be necessary at all. It’s frustrating, currently, and while I’m at the mercy of people who have much better things to do and problems to solve, I am still stick with this perfectly good model that I can’t even use for what I need it for.

Whining aside, if anyone could at least help me out (even to tell me that there’s no alternative in the first place, so I’m not sitting here throwing useless attempts together for nothing), it would be greatly appreciated.

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That’s a tough one. I worked with Unreal Ed 2 a long time ago with a texture mod. I’m not sure how you would save an object as an animation frame. I’d try to find some old mod tool to convert a .3ds to vertex animation. Or you could see if one of the old Blender versions supports vertex animation.

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Thanks for the reply. I’ll continue to look into it myself, and I’ll see what I can do about your suggestion. Even if it doesn’t work, it would be something to mention to the developers, and if something manages to work, then I’d like that to be publicized for any sorry soul who has to do this so they can get their answer without too much hassle.