hydraulic door as my first animation

[moose o death]

i've never animated before so some tips would help as i have no idea how to approach this, essentially i'm building this door.
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/5355/doorwip3he4.th.jpg (http://img291.imageshack.us/my.php?image=doorwip3he4.jpg)

i'm going to have two animations, which can be played together one after another to look like one longer animation

animation 1, the disk rotates slightly to disengage the looking pins in the door
animation 2, the piston pulls the door open.

like i've said i have no idea how to animate so i'll be quite some time finishing this up, time to scour the tutorials i can find on animating machines

[moose o death]

the views to comments ratio is really low.

so here's the vimeo link to my animated door

http://vimeo.com/1350608

some changes have occured since the first image, and some changes have occured since i made this film. XSi honestly didn't make that painful... but i haven't exported it yet either so we'll see how well it exports keyframe animations soon enough.

[ElysiumGX]

This is good. The short return swing at the end really sells it. It's a little more than just a transition from start to end keyframe. If you plan to do more to improve appearance, for the door and the wall, I would suggest adding more rotation to the lock before it opens. At least 90 degrees, so it's more noticeable. The modeling could use more structural shape from reference, as the current shapes are a bit too simple. Large reinforced outlining shapes with smaller braces held together by bolts, etc. And a nice texture would complete it.

[moose o death]

to put it simply, it didn't export well.

those two little divetts on the disk are the pins that operate the latches, that's why it only rotates 15 degree's

it'll be more obvious one i have handles on there.

i will be adding more details like rivets and welds, but i'll let the normalmap hold all that. there's a crysis like engine waiting for this thing.

my biggest issue right now is getting the animation to work in that engine, the door swinging open and the latch both work, the hydraulic piston is letting it down, so far i'm upto constraining effectors to nulls which are parented to objects.

i can sort of get it working but without constrain direction it all moves very poorly.


edit: all working now, i'm fairly confident in the animation working in engine now, just needs to be finalised and exported....and a programmer fix it so i can trigger the animation

[moose o death]

in engine
http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/5969/wipnoramjm8.th.jpg (http://img244.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wipnoramjm8.jpg)

the normals are disgustingly bad, and i'm not sure how to tackle that. it all looks fine in xsi so it's more of ultimate unwrap's problem to fix.

[Cryrid]

the normals are disgustingly bad, and i'm not sure how to tackle that. it all looks fine in xsi...
Try inverting the green channel. With OGL (what XSI uses by default), x/y/z = +r/+g/+b, but with directx (which I imagine is what the game is using?), x/y/z = +r/-y/+b

Otherwise, it might just mean some tweaking with the lights in the level editor.

[moose o death]

nah opengl game, but yeah they still need inverting.

nope this is the face normals, what i think needs to happen is i make much higher resolution meshes and i ultimap the normals out of those, onto the low res models i currently have with geometry approximation switched off.

that SHOULD do the trick, i now know why no-one ever makes complex doors like this in games. at least i've learned plenty of valuable tricks in the process.

and it turns out the doors looked better in the actual engine rather than the editor, at the time no-one had built an engine that ran the newest graphics stuff.