Railworks America

Basically this was written by Mrennie a while back:

"Why does my animation work fine in 3DC but goes haywire in RW?
That happened to me because of a group hierarchy in 3DC where the parent group had no objects of its own, i.e. it had only child groups. It looked fine when animated in 3DC, but when exported to RW, the parts were going all over the place. When I got rid of the parent group, the animation in 3DC was then the same as in RW. So when I then corrected it in 3DC, it fixed it in RW too."

This is my problem too with 3ds max now. however I just dont understand what he means by any of this. In the past Ive gotten it all to work but I dont know how I did it. I did have these issues too before but I guess I got lucky 5 or 6 times lol. How should my animations be set up in releationship to my other objects.

I have 3 objects that are un-animated. they are names, 1_2000_cab, 1_2000_cab3, and 1_2000_cab5. They are the parents I guess. I have like over 20 individuallly animationed parts that are not grouped to anything yet.

Hey Ian, think you stop posting titles in all caps? Very annoying to be yelled at everytime you have a problem ;)

artimrj wrote:Hey Ian, think you stop posting titles in all caps? Very annoying to be yelled at everytime you have a problem ;)

Got ur attention tho didnt I lol

Yeah got my attention, now I got yours. All caps posts I never even bother to read and I know there are many just like me.

Im going to post my experiences with this, but it's not necessarily a solution.

I've learned that when you move to animate any object in 3DC, you should click on it first and then choose "Reset animation position and orientation" to clear any "inadvertant animation" I may have previously done to the object.

I have learned not to group animated parts any further than 1 subgroup down from the main group. This has caused me animation problems, as well as making it difficult or impossible to link the animation to a control. The best place for animated parts is in a group that is in the root Scene, but that may not be possible if you are trying to avoid the rather meaningless 24 groups error-message.

Also helpful is to reset the group axis before animating a part. A lot of times when you turn or move a part, it's center axis direction doesn't change with the part, and this may cause it to animate in unexpected ways.

OK I fixed it. I xformed everything once again and Everything was put on the root level and not linked. unless its a coupled animation. I just needed to re-export all of the animations and the cab after that. good to go now!

thanks!

Next time you want to ask for help, may I suggest using a more specific topic than the single word "this" will bring better results?