nemyax

New user here. When I select multiple bones in choreography and rotate them, and then try to undo the rotation, A:M's behaviour is very strange. It takes lots of steps to revert to the original state, like this: little nudge, nothing, nothing, little nudge, nothing, nothing, little nudge, etc. The program may also crash in the process. Can anyone reproduce this? Is this a known issue? Generally, A:M (32-bit) is very unstable on my system.

Joe has a funny way of putting it =) He describes a regular honest-to-god rig based on constraints and IK and calls it procedural for some reason. As for feet staying planted on sloping surfaces, the engine's custom real-time IK system takes care of that, modifying existing animation to conform to the terrain. Death animations are diversified by ragdoll physics—another thing that the animation-producing software has nothing to do with. There are a few facilities for real-time tracking as well (for the eyes, for example), also engine-specific. MD5 animations are really just baked keyframes. What you can do to make your character more procedural is construct it from several independent pieces and slap some kind of logic on that in the engine. I don't remember any support for blending pre-baked animations (though I might be wrong).

At this time, I'm considering doing an MD5 (Doom 3) plug-in. I've made one for Blender and use it regularly. But I'm also curious about A:M's animation capabilities—I'd like to find out if A:M "feels right" for me in the animation department the way Wings3D does (for me) in the modelling department. Thanks for all the links!

Ah, the fact the formats are ASCII-based is great to know. Is there a spec for the formats anywhere? And I'd still love some docs for the SDK too, please.

Thanks! Where can I find the SDK documentation?

I see. Is there a way to make a custom import/export plugin? Importantly, one that works with animation data, not just geometry.

What do I do to make A:M read and write a custom model or animation format? For example, suppose I want to use A:M to make animations for a game engine. In Blender, I write a Python script. How do I go about this in A:M? I skimmed through the tech reference document but wasn't able to find anything about file I/O plugin support.

Thanks for the prompt reply! How likely is a V19 release?

What version of A:M does one get with the $299 no-subscription offer? Does the license ever expire? Why are there no upgrade options for users of version 17 and earlier?