We are creating animation sequences for what will be an aggressive MOB (enemy) in the game. We are creating them in Maya. The animation sequences are for:
Run
Walk
Turn
Attack
Die

Each animation, of course, will be called upon separately according to how we set up the AI of the MOB.

My question is concerning how to create files for these sequences. Can we create one animation file in Maya which includes all animation sequences or do we need to create separate files for each sequence in order to import into EE?

I think you can create a single animation set in Maya and then just split out the individual animations using the Esenthel Model Editor.

Can someone elaborate on this please? I'm in the same boat as dragonfly3. I've actually created a number of MOBs and avatars (I won't say how many - it's sick if I need to redo anything). I created them all in one animation but in 3DS Max 9. I exported them in open collada and dragged the .dae into model editor. It create the mesh, brought over texture, translated skeleton and animation just great. Only, I can seem to figure out how to break the 19+ second animation into the different files. Anyone?

Hope I didn't hijack your thread dragonfly it seemed to line up perfectly.

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Did some digging....
http://www.esenthel.com/community/showth...=animation

Seems we need to break it up in Maya or 3DS first is the easier method. :(

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ok... did some playing around and some net surfing and got the solution or - a solution for me.

IF (big if) you use the open collada exporter, and it's the same in Maya as it is in 3DS Max, the last section (animation) of the exporter has an option "sample animation". I check that and select the start and end frames of my animation section I want. Save that to a DAE (human_male_run.dae for instance). Then hop into Model editor, load the main mesh (that hopefully you already imported previously) then load the main skeleton (that hopefully you already imported previously) then drag the new animation file in. That will prompt you to import all, import the animation or import the texture. Choose the second (animation) and it will same a .anim file with the same name (human_male_run.anim). then you have that section of animation.

I'm off to have a few vodka red bulls then start doing all my animation exporting....

Esenthel, if you want, pm or e-mail me and I can write this up in a wiki page for you/the community.

Hope this helps!
gh

I haven't been online in a few days. Thanks for the answers! I think I will ask my animator to stick with separate animations. It seems like it may be simpler (or at least on my end it will save me time since I have a million other things to do for the game) than all of the importing/exporting. We wanted to get this answered before my animator started working on the animations. Thanks!