Animating an object using translation?

Animating an object using translation?

I'm a noob when it comes to modeling.. but using cheetah has been a great experience.. especially thanks to the beginner tutorials.. but I've run into a stumbling block.

I'm trying to make a spring board object for my Unity game. It consists of two platforms and a spring inbetween. It basically looks like a spool of thread. At first I animated it using morph targets. It worked beautifully in cheetah but I soon found that Unity doesn't support this type of animation. So now I'm trying to figure out how to do it another way. Joints proved to be too painful of a process, as it deforms the mesh too much.

If I select all the geometry in the top platform and translate it down and up, I can create the effect I was looking for. However, the record doesn't seem to pickup that type of change in the object. Am I doing it wrong? Is there any way to keyframe record translation without using morphs?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi,
the position or translation of a object should be recorded. Did you select the moving object when you clicked on the record button since only the keys of the selected object are recorded.

Bye,
Martin

Martin said:

Hi,
the position or translation of a object should be recorded. Did you select the moving object when you clicked on the record button since only the keys of the selected object are recorded.

Bye,
Martin

Click to expand...

Thanks. I gave it another shot. But it's not working. I am able to do an animation using positions, but that isn't quite what I'm trying to do.

Let me show some pictures. This is all one object.

Hi,
you can only record object transformations but no polygon (vertex) animations. If you moved some vertices that movement can be recorded. But that isn't necessary in your case.

Put the spring and the upper platform into their own polygon objects. Then animate the spring by scaling it. And animate the upper platform by translating it. That will give you exactly what you want.

Bye,
Martin

Martin said:

Hi,
you can only record object transformations but no polygon (vertex) animations. If you moved some vertices that movement can be recorded. But that isn't necessary in your case.

Put the spring and the upper platform into their own polygon objects. Then animate the spring by scaling it. And animate the upper platform by translating it. That will give you exactly what you want.

Bye,
Martin

Click to expand...

That's what I figured... now I just need to figure out how to move those polygons into a separate object... it shouldn't take me long to figure it out though...

Thanks again.. and thanks for the great app.

Now I just need unity to start reading the morph targets and it would make my life a lot easier.