CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P6: Iwish to thank the editing team at Charles River Media (Emi Smith, Karen Gill, Jennifer Blaney, and Jenifer Niles) for their help in getting this book publish-ready. Thanks, too, to my technical editor, Mike Duggan. Also deserving recognition are the guys who make the Torque Game Engine available, GarageGames, who directly or indirectly made this book and the accompanying CD possible. In particular, I want to thank Joe Maruschak at GarageGames for the great articles and forum answers that have helped me and many others get a handle on this engine. I. | 128 Creating Game Art for 3D Engines Animating the Health patch Animating the health patch is a little more involved because it consists of three components and it uses IFL animated textures. First you must parent the pulse and exhaust meshes to the main body of the health patch. You do this with the Select and Link tool. The location of the Select and Link button is shown in Figure . This figure also points out the location of the Affect Pivot Only button in the Hierarchy panel. Once the meshes have been linked and pivots adjusted if necessary the main body of the health patch can be animated by using Auto Key. FIGURE Select and Link creates parent-child relationships. Adjusting Pivot Points with Affect Pivot Only Carefully place pivot points for any object that is going to rotate. You can move the pivot point for any object by selecting the object and then turning on Affect Pivot Only from the Adjust Pivot rollout in the Hierarchy panel. Normally you would just use the Move tool to move the pivot point until it is exactly over the area you want. Check at least two or three orthographic viewports to verify that the position is what you think it is mesh positions can be deceptive in the user and perspective viewports. When the pivot point is in the position you want turn off the Affect Pivot Only button. Chapter 5 Animating Game Art 129 Creating Parent-Child Relationships The Select and Link tool in the Standard toolbar is useful for connecting two objects so that when one moves the other does too. The health patch you are animating in this chapter requires such a linkage so that when you animate the main body of the model the other mesh objects come along with it. Normally the main mesh or model is the parent and other objects that are linked to it are the children. Using a car as an analogy the chassis of the car is the parent and the body wheels and engine are the children. If you want to attach a wheel to the chassis you could say you are going to parent
