Animating horse

[riddick1994]

Hi,

 

So there's something I would like to do.

 

I have a horse model with bones:

https://imgur.com/LgdRsXt[/img]

 

I have an animation for the horse:

https://imgur.com/fbPcSl9[/img]

 

I would like to make that horse as an object without PED bones but still with animations.

 

Is this possible to do? Anyone's got any idea?

Edited August 5, 2020 by riddick1994

[gtadrive]

How do you want to make an object with animation but without bones? Bones within object is what animation applies to to make object animated, or I did not understood your goals

[LeeC22]

On 8/28/2020 at 7:34 AM, gtadrive said:

How do you want to make an object with animation but without bones? Bones within object is what animation applies to to make object animated, or I did not understood your goals

Before the bones system was invented, animation used to be done by mesh-blending. You would create keyframes with all the vertices moved to a position to form one frame of the animation. You would create as many frames as you needed to make the blend work well.. To play back the animation, you would interpolate between the old position and the new position for each vertex... that would make the animation look smoother. Models were built with very few polygons back then (this was during the late 1980s we were doing this), so it wasn't too much of a problem.

 

The technique is still being used today though, you can see it in action in this video.

 

@riddick1994 You could still do the same thing here by taking the mesh object at certain points of the animation (to create an animation frame) and then exporting that out as a Prop, You just wouldn't be able to do the interpolation, so the animation would look jerky if you didn't use enough frames... It's like 2D sprite animation for 3D models.

 

To animate it you'd have to hide and show the props in sequence and then move the prop in code to make the horse move. It wouldn't look great but it would probably work. You'd also need to keep the polygon count fairly low, to make sure you weren't eating into game memory while doing it.