- Blender DTS Exporter 0.97 Documentation Index
- Installing the Exporter
- Overview of the DTS File Format
- Setting Up DTS Shapes in Blender
- User Interface Overview
- Tutorials
- DTS Meshes
- DTS Materials
- DTS Animations
- LOD - Levels of Detail
- Blender Survival Guide
- Deleting a Blender Action
- Adding Game Properties to an object
- Creating Action Strips
- Creating a "skinned" mesh
- Creating an action animation
- Creating an object animation
- Creating and renaming timeline markers
- External Links
- Mapping images to faces on a mesh
- Moving objects between layers
- Parenting one object to another
- Renaming objects
- Setting mesh shading modes
- Setting meshes as single sided
- Viewing Bone Axes
- Viewing Object Axies
- Viewing object transform properties
- Working with Blender "windows"
- Changes from earlier versions
- Notes on Coordinate systems
- Notes on Scale
- Quick Export Feature
- Troubleshooting
- Exporter Credits
Creating an object animation
Sun, 01/11/2009 - 17:10 — Joseph Greenawalt
Object animations are created in Blender by keyframing object location, rotation, and scale on the NLA timeline.
The process of animating an object through keyframing is outlined below:
- Select an object in Blender's 3d view
- Move, rotate or scale (Blender keyboard shortcuts: 'g' - grab/move, 'r' - rotate, 's' - scale) the selected object in Blender's 3d view.
- Insert a keyframe for the object by pressing 'i'. Select the keyframe type from the menu that appears. The following keyframe types are supported by the Blender DTS Exporter: Loc, Rot, Scale, LocRot, LocScale, LocRotScale and RotScale.
- Move the current frame forward by using the arrow keys, or left-clicking in the NLA Editor window. Reposition, rotate, or scale your object again and insert a new keyframe. Repeat until the animation is complete.
The Blender DTS Exporter examines the actual positions of all objects during an animation instead of relying solely on IPO motion keyframes and curves. This allows for easy export of animations that are affected by or created with constraints without any "Baking" of the animations or or other special setup work. The animations that you see on the screen in Blender should be nearly identical after export.
It is important to note that the Blender DTS exporter can only sample object transforms on whole numbered (integer) frame numbers; it is therefore a good idea to align your keyframes to whole numbered frames while creating and editing animations. When animations are exported to the dts file format, every whole numbered frame becomes a keyframe in the exported animation. Whether or not keyframes are exported for a given object or node in the scene is determined by checking to see if the object has moved from it's rest tranfrom as defined on frame 1 of the NLA timeline.
See also: