3d Animation imported into Construct 2

Hi!

I am a 3d Animator playing with the 2d Game-Engine Construct 2.

Sice you cannot animate in Construct 2 the way I like it... by setting keyframes... I came up with an idea to export animations from my favorite animation software Softimage (which is a shame that Autodesk stopped developing this year ) into the game engine.

http://youtu.be/Vc4SOl7RUyw

What you can see here is 3d animation data from Softimage exported to Construct 2.

I wrote a python script which exports object positions of 3d animations as json-files.

And in Construct I programmed an event-sheet that scans a folder for those .json files and generates Sprites for every .json file and animates their positions.

In this case It was 399 Objects constraint to points on an animated 3d model.

Oh.. and of course the 3d animation was also done by me .

I screen recorded this on my weak macbook, because I don't have a screen recording software on my pc.

The fps on my pc are around 40 to 50.

And there the Sound is actually in sync with the animation.

I hope that you find my test interesting and feel to leave a comment.

Thanks

That's a pretty neat test! It seems pretty fluid!

This is very interesting....Is possible to have displayed polygons instead of dots? I mean only the lines not the planes.

Cool. Do you do any keyframe blending or is it just straight keyframes? Thought about adding rotation?

Hello Cipriux,

I think at the moment it would be kind of hard to make a "fake" wireframe out of that, because the dots (which are simple 2d sprites) are generated by Construct at runtime and they do not know with whom they were connected in the original 3d-animation. To make this work I would have to pass that information into the json files I export from Softimage.

I think it's not impossible, but surely a lot of work.

My original intention for this export was not to display 3d models in Construct... my goal was to use a "professional" animation package to make animations for Construct.

I would use it to animate for example the different patterns in a bossfight or crazy enemy flight maneuvers in a space shooter.

That would be kind of hard to do in Construct with just behaviors and expressions.

I was just using this as an example to test the performance... which is not as good as I first thought.

In my first test I was exporting just the skeleton of the 3d-character and everything was super smooth with easily over 60 fps. That was with around 30 objects.

Then I tried to export all the positions of the 3d-mesh points... these were around 7000.

And that kills Construct completely .

Interaction is completely impossible at less that 1 fps.

I guess Construct 2 is quite capable of moving 7000 sprites at a decent performance, but I think it's too much that every sprite reads its animation data from an individual array every frame.

Maybe it would be better to write all the data in one big array that all sprited can access.... but who knows .

But I guess for the stuff i am planning to use it it's fast enough.

I don't think i will ever build a boss with more than 30 sprites.

Cheers

Hi R0J0hound,

it's just keyframes.

It's baked animation with a keyframe on every frame.

Oh... and rotations already work, but i did not use it in this example, because I thought it would look weired to see the shiny parts on the dots moving.

It was a bit tricky to make it work, because at first I had some crazy flipping going on.

But when i changed the rotation order and the possible angles from 0 to 360 degrees in Softimage it seems to be stable in Construct.

thanks for your interest