Keynote Reference Guide

[HwitVlf]

There are keyed pedestals in SoM that use a trick which might work for the apple cut. They keep a copy of their key Item inside their stand until the player activates them. Then the key instantly 'pops' out then slowly floats into the pedestal's lock. With a thicker chopping block, the split apple could be hidden inside and instantly switch with the whole apple when the cut occurs. Verdite was wondering about "growing spikes" on a model; could work for that too.

Assimp doesn't support FBX. I was hoping the plugin could import animations to Meta, but I've tried several FBX files and I don't think it works for animation. It would have to be a pretty sophisticated plugin to auto generate anchor boxes with materials and all.

But the FBX plugin successfully exported your apple model (animation and all) and loaded it in MAX- so at least our animated models aren't locked into Meta format anymore.

[Verdite]

Hey thats awesome. Good to pass files around through programmes eh? Though ive never used max before.

[airflamesred]

That is indeed great news. I'm reliably informed that collada is the better format but beggers can't be choosers! I guess the problem lies with neither mqo or mqx having all the data stored. The apple looks fairly complete with just the two halves together so you might get away without the original one. I looked at the select tag but no joy there.

Anyway here's todays output with morphs so we can see if they translte to the game. If, like me, you get nagged at for spending so much time on the pc, here's  your chance to show its not all wasted. (and you have my permission to say you made it yourself!)

Ooh- wifes at the door

EDIT theres definately a problem with the camera saving at some funny axis - weird

[airflamesred]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LC1FuspgRg

Don't know if anyone has spotted this.
Seems to use that mkx converter you found HwitVLF

[HwitVlf]

Anyway here's todays output with morphs so we can see if they translte to the game. If, like me, you get nagged at for spending so much time on the pc, here's  your chance to show its not all wasted. (and you have my permission to say you made it yourself!)
Ooh- wifes at the door
EDIT theres definately a problem with the camera saving at some funny axis - weird

Lol! I drive my wife nuts sometime yapping about the details of my latest KF/SoM exploits. So I'll tell her the rose I made her (wink wink) was for putting up with all my techno-gabber. :)

I've had Meta's camera get tweaked off to the side like with your rose, but it usually resets when I restart Meta; it must be saved in the scenes MQX file.

It looks like morphing isn't exported in the X or FBX formats. They just load as a non-animated closed rose. So I guess morphing is out for ingame models, but it' very cool effect for cut-scene movies.

For me, the best part of having the ability to export to FBX is that it will load into converters like UltimateUnwrapper. I've had my eye on 3DGamestudio for awhile and it's nice to know my models can jump systems.

That youtube video is nice-especially the water. If I understood the MKX plugin site correctly, the format was made to be compatible with Microsoft's XNA setup, so I expect that video is a scene made in Meta and rendered using the XNA environment.

[airflamesred]

Thats weird about the fbx. I think the problem is that keynote holds only some, and meta the rest of the info that is needed.

[airflamesred]

I ended up filing a bug report with regards to the banking issue with the scene camera.
I must say the lack of fbx has come as a bit of a blow as it looks like terragen will support this soon - though clearly its not going to come directly from meta. Oh well!
I've been playing with the alpha 4 and it seems there are some new selection tools for UV - brush, amongst others.
I'm hopefully going to hear back from the youtube guy - just to see what his pipeline is. A lot of his links lead to 3d game studio. Lets see.

[HwitVlf]

I wonder if the camera thing is a bug in Meta or Keynote?
It might be worth contacting the FBX plugins author. Maybe we're missing something or he might have plans to add morph support soon.

[airflamesred]

Well I was advised to report it as a keynote bug. I think he knows about it for two reasons. reading back through the old bug reports, I think its already mentioned and mqdl has been on line with a bug report for the alpha 4 beta.
It is weird because if fbx is reading bone and anchor info (which is in meta I think) why not read morph or select? I hope this is good news in the long run in the sense that they just need to be intergrated.
Hopefully I will hear back from the youtube guy to see if those other plugins may be of any use.

[HwitVlf]

You probably already know, but I just figured out what the 'Freeze' button in keynote does- changes your model in Meta to match the current pose in Keynote. It could be helpful but also dangerous because it doesn't show up until you leave 'motion' mode. If you push it accidentally and save, your model and animations are toast.

It could be helpful for setting up the morph objects for your sheep though. You could 'freeze' a copy of the sheep into a close-to-right pose, tweak it to perfect in Meta, them import it as a morph object to your regular sheep model. Maybe easier than tweaking the morph pose manually.

If anybody messes up their model with 'freeze', you can "undo" it in Meta, but not with Keynote's undo. I think it would have been better if Keynote created the Freeze as a new object.