Animating bells.

Makkyo

A quick question if I may, I’m working with cry engine 3 and I was wondering what the best way to create an animation for tiny bells hanging from a roof would be? My goal is to make it seems as though the wind is blowing the bells, Would I have to create an animation in 3dsmax and then export it as such, or is there a quicker way to do it in cryengine3.

Would need to animate both pieces of the bell.

Example bell.

SlyRipper

Hey,

well you have many ways to do this.. one would be to manually animate your bell, but it would be generic (except you create some animations with variations). I'm close to create my first animated objects, therefore I can't say exactly if this would be easy, as you need to save this as another file (cga instead of cgf), there could be some requirements and some more time to spent on this..

There's also a way within the Engine, via the FlowGraphs you're able to move the object yourself. So you could create a function that rotates your bell and then just replay that function. Search on youtube for "moving entities" (I'm going to watch those, too. Just starting with the Engine :P )

Another way would be to use vegetations instead, so you could use some kinda "grass in the wind" effect and apply it to the bell. Saying the engine, that the bell is part of your vegetation and reacts to the wind. Could be the easiest way, but not sure if this works and also looks like you want.

Sorry just can give you tipps to go the right directions, as I'm not that far.
(But I guess UDK or atm Unity is more interessting for the people here :P CryEngine doesn't get much response as it seems ^^)

Makkyo

Thanks for your reply, i will look into the methods you suggested tomorrow morning. I like the idea of allows the wind to move the object the same way it moves grass etc, will look into it.

Yeah, im much more familiar with UDK myself, but wanted to learn some cryengine too.

Olli.

vegetation wind deform is not rigid, so it might look weird on a metal bell.

the way most games would do this is to just have a generic loop animation of the bell swinging, and then run that on all your bells with various delays so theyre not all synchronized.

if you wanna go super hardcore you could rig the bell up as a character and use the ragdoll system to have the bell hanging. I cant remember if wind affects ragdoll entities but for example if the object the bells are attached to moves, this approach would return some very awesome results

Makkyo

Thanks for the reply, im planning on leaving the bell animation until last, so that it leaves me enough time to investigate the methods laid out in this thread.

Im thinking a basic loop animation will suffice for now but the rag doll idea is very tempting