Animation

This chapter describes procedures and precautions for creating animations using NintendoWare in Softimage.

Overall Animation
Character Animation
Visibility Animation
Color Animation
Texture Pattern Animation
Scene Animation

Animation Overview

Automatically Creating Animation Data

When using the Softimage exporter, animation curve data for output is created automatically from baked data from frame values.

Values Output to CMDL Files

If attributes are being animated, values for the start frame specified with the Export option are output to the CMDL file. Note, however, that bind pose values will be output for the translate, rotate and scale nodes, which are affected by skinning.
Note: Be aware that the values of the current frame in Softimage are not the values being output.

Visibility animation

This type of animation controls the Visibility attribute of a node to make it displayed or hidden.
Visibility animation data is output to the intermediate file as an CMDLA file.

To configure a visibility animation, set the animation curve to View Visibility.

When the Export option Compress Node has been set to Cull Useless Node or Cull Uninfluential Node, make sure nodes which have visibility animations configured are not compressed, since visibility animation is set on a node basis. (You can set the compression disable flag using the NW4C_ForBanner Set No Compress Node Plug-in).
When using visibility animation, do not set the Compress Node Export option to Unite Compressible Node or Unite All Node.

Color Animation

Diffuse, Specular, Incandescence Color

Color animations are set by animating the Color, Transparency (R value), Specular Color and Incandescence Color of material nodes.
When Enable is used to configure ON/OFF animations, in the OFF state these colors are output as black.

Polygon Alpha

This configures animation for Transparency.
If Enable is turned OFF, the object is treated as opaque. If Enable is on and UseAlpha is also turned on, an animation configured for the Alpha values is output to the intermediate file as the diffuse alpha value.
If UseAlpha is OFF, an animation configured for the Red Color values is output to an intermediate file. (Green and Blue values are ignored.)

If the Export option for material compression is enabled, even materials for which color animation is not set sometimes get animated as a result of material collecting. If this happens, use the NW4R_ForBanner Set Material Attribute plug-in to change settings so that materials for which color animation is set are not compressed.

Texture Pattern Animation

This type of animation swaps textures.
Texture pattern animation data can be output to the intermediate file as a material animation (.cmata file).

Setting Attributes

Texture pattern animation settings use either sequential textures or SCR files supported as standard by Softimage.

    An SCR file is a text-format file with file extension .scr.
    In an SCR file, the absolute path to the texture image file to be displayed in the nth frame (where n is an integer greater than or equal to 1) under Softimage is written on the SCR file's nth line. This allows you to animate displays by swapping texture patterns by frame number by specifying an SCR file, rather than specifying a texture image file for each Image node in Softimage as is commonly done. These cannot be specified for negative frames having a value equal to or less than 0.

Sequential textures are textures that have been given sequential numbers, such as p.1.tga, p.2.tga, and p.3.tga.

Whether you use SCR files or sequential textures, edits made using the Warp feature of Softimage (a feature for editing the correspondence between frames and textures using a graph) are not applied.

Texture SRT Animation

This type of animation varies the SRT of a texture by manipulating a texture matrix.
Texture SRT animation data can be output to the intermediate file as an CMATA file.

Setting Attributes

Texture SRT animations are configured according to the procedure below.
Apply textures in Softimage,and open the Texture Projection property editor. Move to the frame you want to configure, and set animation keys for ScalingU, ScalingV, RotationW, Translation U, and Translation V.

Scene Animation

Scene animations are configured by animating the camera and light attributes.

Camera

Lights


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