Hi,

A couple of questions to those of you who have had a chance to mess around with bones and the new bones animation commands in A6. I haven't upgraded to A6 yet, so I'm just reading the documentation and trying to work out how it all works, which is difficult to visualise without seeing it in MED and messing around with the functions...

1) ent_bonerotate. This sounds like a great function. Would this enable me to turn the torso of a model in a specific direction whilst the legs remain facing the original direction? If so, how does it work? Especially:

a)In the documentation it says that you name the bone, and all of its children are rotated. Does this mean that you can somehow give bones (or joints) individual names in MED?

b) How would you set up a skeleton so that only a torso was rotated? Eg. If there is a joint at the centre of the hip, from which the rest of the skeleton comprises its children, how would you make it so that by rotating this joint, only the upper bones would rotate, not the lower ones? Or am I approaching this wrong? Would you in fact create another child joint from the hip joint and then create the rest of the torso from this, and then rotate that bone? (Er, I hope you can understand what I mean... [Smile] )

2) Is it easier to blend animations (ie. from walk to run, from run to stand still etc) using bones than using vertex animation, or just as complicated?

3) Using ent_animate() and bone scenes, the manual says that "only bones affected by the given scene are set to their new orientation" - what does this mean? For instance, say I want a human model to run whilst shooting. I use ent_animate() to set the running animation. Then how would I use ent_animate() to play the shooting animation only on the torso? Does this mean that when animating the shooting animation I should not move the legs at all? (But won't even the none-movement of the legs be registered as an animation of sorts and override the running motion?)

Sorry for the bombardment of questions, but I am just trying to work out the new bones commands...

Many thanks,
Keith