Proposal - Animation editor / rendering script proposal

[mvBarracuda]

As outlined in the walk cycle thread: having an animation editor for the artists would surely ease your work. I've started to compile a list of notes what functionality would be useful to have for such an editor. We might actually need two tools for the purpose:
1. Rendering scripts for the supported 3d modeling packages
2. The animation editor itself

Right now the article is not really consistent but I wanted to get early feedback on the topic, so there you go:
http://wiki.parpg.net/Tool:Animation_Editor

Feedback appreciated. Especially by Sirren as he had to do a bunch of XML file editing by hand AFAIR.

[Border]

i'm still working on my rendering script for 3DS MAX. so thats one.
From what i read on the wiki, it can be possible to extend it so it convert the animation editor and the XML part.
but if someone offer to create it externally i won't mind, plus it might help to contourn the 3d package issue.

[Atomic]

Howdy,

I'd be happy to work on the animation tool once we get all the features finalized.  My one sugguestion, have everything start at 0 instead of 1.

[Sirren]

I gave a look at the xml tool proposal and I thin it's good.
Since all animations require 8 xml files, would it be possible to automatically generate a file for each rotation? Directly in the proper folder, maybe?

[mvBarracuda]

Yep, that's the plan Sirren :-)

[Sirren]

Any news about this task?
A feature I'd like to see: each sprite orientation has a .XML file defining the animation delay. Would it be possible to edit eight existing files at once? It'd be handy.

[mvBarracuda]

No news AFAIK. I could try to create a mockup over the weekend if you like, that might help the programmers to get an idea what kind of tool we're aiming for. Should I go for it?

[Sirren]

Personally I can do without such a tool for Techdemo1, but I'm sure we'll really need it for production. If you have enough spare time to do a mockup then please do it. I'd give priority to the techdemo, though.

[shevegen]

Ok perhaps no programmer saw it, will mention it on IRC tomorrow.

each sprite orientation has a .XML file defining the animation delay

Gonna see what they say and post updates here.

[mvBarracuda]

There is already trunk/utilities/agentxmlgen.py shevegen :-) It takes care of automating most of the tedious work.

[shevegen]

kk all the better, question answered!