Wikitude

Multiple keyframe animations on single model

Hi folks, quick question. Is it possible to bake several animations into a model and then play them separately? As it stands when I import an FBX, I get one animation option in the exporter which is all of them. It's relatively vital that we can play animations on a model separately for our project.

For the sake of argument, let's say it's a humanoid with a walk, run and idle cycle. How would I call for those animations separately?

Yes, that's possible. See, for example, the documention which explains how the Wikitude3dEncoder deals with such fbx files and how to use the animations in the SDK: http://www.wikitude.com/external/doc/documentation/latest/ios/3dmodels.html#model_parts_animation

I've read about that before, and that's not what I'm looking for. Or doesn't seemto be. To elaborate, I separate animations by keyframes when they're on a single model. Like, I would play the run cycle which is from frame 0 to 50, then space 5 frames, then have the run animation go from frame 55 to 100, skip 5 frames etc. How do I tell the encoder to separate animations out like that? else I would have to load in different models every time I want to do a different animation and that just seems like overkill.

We have examples of such 3D models from other customers which work fine. Their fbx contains a single, long animation. Certain parts of that animation are represented by different  "takes". I guess, that is exactly your use case.

So the answer to your question is "yes", the Wikitude3dEncoder supports such models and provides different animation names for each sub-animation which can then be started by the SDK on the device. 

If you are asking how you can create such models, I don't have a complete answer. It seems that Maya or 3dsMax cannot provide different animations (streams) in one fbx. But if you save different animations on the same 3D model in separate fbx files, there are tools which can merge them and provide them as different "takes" with a single fbx. I personally don't know which tool can do that, but I would appreciate to hear about it, if you managed to do that. One customer reported that he stored the fbx in ASCII format and edited it by hand to do that. 

There is also another way to split up an animation within the wt3 file format. But the process is not automated. It has to be done manually by us. So, if we are talking about only a few, single 3D models we can do that for you.