Does anyone know how to make pre-animated meshes for Vue.

I know how to make them for simple movements, like a door opening, but that would be a rediculous thing to do, because the user could just do that themselves. I am talking about complicated motions, like walk cycles, animated tank tracks, etc. How do you get the motion data into Vue. There are some things you cannot manually key frame. For me to make a tank with animated tank tracks, it means if the tank has 168 track links, I would have to manually keyframe each track link 168 times to simulate one revolution of the tracks, that is 28 224 manual key frames.

So how did they make the pre-animated meshes that come with Vue? How can we make our own? Does anybody know?

folk import poser items :)

the tank track thing, what you'd need to do is make one track the initial, and all the rest linked from it. you'd also need ot set the pivot points for each track to be in line with the connector to the track it's parented to.

REAL pain but only practical way

Silverblade, importing Poser items does not work for me. Once I have saved the model as a Vue object, it still requires the Poser PZ3 to make the actual animation work, which means it is not a pre-animated mesh, but a Poser import.

I have no idea what you mean about the tank tracks. I have the tank tracks working, but they require the Poser files to run. If the user does not have the Poser PZ3, then the animation data isn't there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gczxUE-XIq4

Has anyone actually made a pre-animated mesh? All I see are the ones that came with Vue. Everyone says it's easy to do, but no-one has done it that I can find. Are there any pre-animated meshes for sale or free download that I can ask the creators how they did it?

Attached Link: Marching Legion video (DIVX codec)

If you have made an aniamted item in Poser, you can import it into vue WITH the animation.
THen you can save it as  Vue item and it will retain the animation (or should do)
currently Poser7 is acting buggy with vue though.

I made an aniamtion of a marhcing legion not longer after Vue infinite 5 cam eout, doign that :)
(animation uses the DIVX codec, which you would need to view this)

E-on has an export plugin for 3ds max that will export pre-animated meshes. The problem is that these meshes update extremely slow and are for the most part almost unusable. Try importing one of the pre-animated human meshes they have and see how unresponsive vue becomes as soon as the mesh is loaded in.

That is why I use poser to import all my animations.

As far as I know, only 3ds max has a pre-animated mesh export feature to vue and it is unsupported software written by e-on.

Silverblade, if you import the Poser animation, save as a Vue item, and move that to a machine that doesn't have the original Poser animation, then the Vue animation doesn't work. We tested this extensivley over the last two days using Vue 6 Infinite, and Easel.

If you take your animation of the legion, and send it to me, I can guarantee you that it will not work unless I have the original Poser PZ3 file. I have made hundreds of animations in Vue, but it doesn't mean that those models are pre-animated meshes, they still get their animation data from Poser.

So my final conclusion is that you can't make pre-animated meshes without MAX, and that even if you could, Poser animations work better.

Quote - So my final conclusion is that you can't make pre-animated meshes without MAX, and that even if you could, Poser animations work better.

That is my experience. Now I have used 3ds max to export animations as pre-animated meshes and it does work...just extremely slow. I used it to create some physics animations using the Reactor engine in Max. The results were fine, but I much prefer using Poser for importing animations.

jeesh :(
oh well, another thing to bug E-On about then! ;)