Animation script for multiple meshes?

[kayla Mekanic]

Hello, I'm trying to make a mesh i've made of a creature into a ridable moving vehicle, but I have no experience in scripting... I made a static pose of the mesh, and two walking poses which i haven't actually uploaded into the normal grid yet. I was wondering would i be able to link all three meshes and have the walking poses invisible when its in idle mode, but then once the object moves, the idle animation dissapears and the two walking poses play like an animation? (sorry if I make no sence XP)

[Medhue Simoni]

Yeah, it is actually not that hard, but you have to think about the land impact cost of the meshes. Basically, you are tripling your Land impact costs by doing it this way. You could just animate the legs, which would lower your land impact considerably. Probably the best way for land impact, would be to actually animated the parts using a prim animator. This would actually move the meshes. It might also be worth it to check out LL's new llSetKeyFrameMotion function. Good luck!

[kayla Mekanic]

Oh ok thanks!

[Rufus Darkfold]

llSetKeyFrameAnimation only works on whole link sets, so you couldn't animate the legs that way, at least not directly, since a vehicle generally has to be a single linkset.

The only smooth animation available for child prims afaik is flexi.   A combination of suiitable movement and rotation of the root prim with llSetKeyFrameAnimation and tweaking of  flexi parameters may produce the desired results.   That is what I did with these dancers:

using this tool.  This probably won't help here, since there is no flexi mesh.

Another possibility might be to have the creature's legs actually be attachments worn by the sitter with a suitable animation being run on the sitter as well to get the desired motion  (I haven't tried this).

 

[Qie Niangao]

If the models for the different poses are mostly identical, and if you haven't used all eight faces for something else, you could specify separate materials for the parts that differ between poses, and animate by simply toggling visibility of the corresponding mesh faces.

[Medhue Simoni]

I could be wrong, but for worn items, making parts transparent will skyrocket the total Display Cost of the whole mesh. It doesn't just calculate the parts that are transparent, it penalizes the whole mesh, and every verts counts toward that penalty. I've not tried this with rezzed or physical object, but I think the Display Cost works the same either way. I could be wrong tho.

[Qie Niangao]

That could be, and certainly in the case of partially transparent textures, it would make sense that the Display cost be higher because they are genuinely harder to render.  That really shouldn't be true of completely transparent faces which shouldn't be rendered at all -- but I have no idea if that's handled properly either for rendering or Display cost accounting.

From a scripting standpoint, it surely requires less work for the sim to toggle alpha than to change object geometry.  On the other hand, geometric prim animation may look more natural than does alpha-flipping, depending on how much the shape should flex as it moves through its path.