Max animation time?

[Ozian]

Hello,

I have been teaching myself Blender for TMTK and have managed to successfully create signs.

For my next project I am creating scenery backdrops that will go up and down within my PlanCo theatre.

Is there a max amount of time allowed for animations within TMTK. I would need around 120 secs for what I need to do and thought I’d ask before I get going so if anyone knows I’d appreciate your advice!

 

[Gohax]

Hi,

no such restriction is documented. To confirm this not being an oversight in the documentation, i extended my test animation (4 bones, 11 keyframes, 24fps; used in my 2.83 guide) to 120sec and it was processed by TMTK without errors. It also looks as expected ingame.


I would still consider splitting your scene up and using a trigger sequence instead, as it would make the individual parts reusable. I don't know what you want to create however, so that's just a suggestion.

 

[Ozian]

Hi Gohax,

Thanks so much for your response and for testing it - I really appreciate it. I’m actually going to check out your tutorial to help me with the animation part of this as that will be new for me.

I’m basically creating a 3 minute stage show (similar setup to a stunt show) for my Oz park with a singer and band using lighting and scenery elements to make it engaging and more of a ‘spectacle’ - think a big band version of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’.

Ive created a theatre building in my park and I’m going to create scenery backdrops which through TMTK will be able to raise above the stage at certain points or move off the sides and below the stage to show ‘scene stages’ during the show.

For example, I want a curtain at the front to raise slowly 5 secs in and then 120 secs later lower again. My understanding is that the animation needs to return to its starting position (unlike the doors in PlanCo which can be triggered to open or close within separate triggers) so I thought this would be a work-around unless there is a way to have 2 separate triggers in TMTK - i.e. raise and lower separately?

 

[Gohax]

Concerning the last part: As far as i'm aware, you can indeed not do separate raise and lower triggers, but if it is raised for 115sec and closed for only 5 (as i understand it), you could "invert the animation":

• In its idle-state, the curtain is open
• the animation is just the few seconds of it closing and opening again
• set the activation trigger to an appropriate time, so that the opening-part of your animation aligns with the scene start.

This will of course only work if your complete show loops without any break inbetween, otherwise this "trick" won't work. If you really need the open and close-durations to be arbitary, you will indeed need the long duration animation.

I mean, in theory there is no harm done by having a 120sec curtain animation (it's the same amount of keyframes afterall, so the file produced is not larger than it would be for a 5 second animation). The only downside is that you need to readjust the animation in blender everytime the length of your show changes, but i guess that is not a big deal if you create the curtain after setting up your show.

Small note about my tutorial: It is not a Blender tutorial, so i did not explain how to create the animations, only how to export the animations to TMTK.

 

[Ozian]

Hi Gohax,

I have spent my morning going through your tutorial 6 different times to check I’m not missing anything and every time I’ve managed to get my item into PlanCo but it isn’t animated. On a couple of occasions it did recognise that it was triggerable but didn’t animate even with a sequencer. Also, I did all the scaling up you suggested but my item appeared the other side of the park (it seems the upscaling stayed at that scale). I’m very confused about what I’m not doing not to make this work. Do you have any advice if I’m not seeing any animation at all in game (at any scale) but I am within Blender?

 

[Gohax]

Hi,

i sent you a PM since it is tough to figure out without more detailed information, and i don't want to clutter the forum.

 

[Ozian]

Thank you. I'll send more info over to you via PM.

 

[Gohax]

For the public readers: We managed to figure it out. The problem was twofold:

1. The keying was accidentally done in object-mode. Since PlanCo only understands bone (i. e. Pose Mode),transformations, the animation was not shown ingame. This can e. g. be checked in the graph editor (Object Transforms mean object-mode keyframes):

2. At least in my Blender 2.90, the FBX-export of the animations did not work deterministically, meaning directly exporting to FBX sometimes leads to a different result than reloading the project and then exporting. I recommend reimporting the generated FBX to check if the animation looks as expected before uploading to TMTK.