Doom3world

i spent last night learning to build a pigeon skeleton and skin the mesh goliathvt gave me to it. first time, so it was rough, but i have what i will consider a "placeholder" flight animation and will continue to work on more of them.

i have a couple of noob questions about building animations and file managment.

do you save a rigged version as say pigeon_base and each time you create an animation you save as something else, say pigeon_fly and pigeon_walk? using pigeon_base as the start for each file?

also, if you feel the need to go back and update the mesh you would then have to do it individually in each mb file right?

one more, if you build your skeleton, freeze transformations, skin it, then want to go back to the skeleton and change joint constraints will it cause problems when exporting? can or should you refreeze transformations after modifying the skeleton.

i know these are modeling and animation questions and there is a forum just for that, but i had hoped to make this thread a complete documentation on how the pigeons are build, modeling, animation, ai, etc.

thanks all

i have read through four chapters of maya 5 fundamentals, and have figured out that it is going to be a while before i feel good enough with maya to give the pigeon feet and rig and animate him.

simple things like projects i didn't even know about but need to learn first.

if anyone is willing to help me animate this little guy i would really like to get back to creating the flocking functionality.

i figure i can create an entity def that allows for the fov, separation, and perhaps other influencing variables to be set in the editor so you can easily tweak flocking behavior.

It would make for a nice addition to the project i think, animators please help

well, off to read chapter 5