CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P11: 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. | 278 Creating Game Art for 3D Engines Exporting Character Animation DSQ files Characters require the same general markers and meshes as the other art assets but there are some important differences particularly to get the animations to properly export. As mentioned in Chapter 11 the best way to manage your animations is to create them in separate files although it is possible to export your animation sequences as part of the DTS export. The process we will be using is to export a DTS file of your character mesh and create a DSQ export for each animation from the run to the backward run to the jump. The 3ds Max file you are using for the different animations does not need the character mesh all you need is the biped and the other associated markers and Sequence objects. There is an order to setting up your exports so that you do not end up re-creating markers and linkages. Start by defining your character shape file with all the markers and parent-child relationships so that you can export the DTS file. Then use a copy of that file to animate the root animation and move on to separate copies of the other animations. Delete the mesh when you are ready to export the DSQ file. The hierarchy when exporting a character animation is much the same as the hierarchy shown in Figure except that the animation will have a Sequence object. Figure illustrates the changes between the two files this image shows the position of the bounds object in the hierarchy the Sequence object and the deletion of the character mesh and any other associated meshes. Because it is helpful to have a version of the character animation with the mesh intact it is recommended that you save a copy of the file before deleting the character mesh and exporting the DSQ file. FIGURE The run sequence is almost ready to be exported. Chapter 12 Character Exporting 279 Sequence Object Setup For a typical animation export you first have to make sure your Sequence object export settings are correct.
