hey, for the next few weeks i'll be working on a drifting scene and, im wondering, is there a way to animate, say, a group of cubes/low LOD objects, and then have it's animation data transfered to a car? i figure if i could do this it would save me a lot of time rather than trying to efficiently animate hi-res objects

thanks

EDIT: wrong forum, could a mod move this to the newb forum please

Not sure if i really understand you, but you can make box/low poly model of a car and high poly model, and 'join' all of them into one LOD group. You can then animate this group, and all the lods will animate with it. You can also set the range on which lower or higher poly lod model will appear.

what i mean is that i want to be able to animate a low res geo and have it's animations transfer to a high res geo... i think you got it though cause your answer seems to suit what i mean :p i guess i have to look for a tut on that now

Well, here is how it goes then.

Make all the lod models. Then select all of them(the order is important here), and go to EDIT->LEVEL of DETAILS->GROUP.

Then open up Outliner, and you should have a new group there. By default it has name LodGroup.

Now you can animate THIS lod group, set the distance fom where difrent lod levels appears. To do that, select this LOD group, and in channelbox, there you have option called 'Treshold[number]'. The number represents the LOD level. Now you can set here distance. AND that's pretty much it. Just don't forget to select the lodGroup, not the model itself when animating.

wow, cool, thanks man, really appreciate the help

okay, another question...

say im setting up a circle drifting scene, if i use a CV curve for a motion path, how would i go about having it repeat the path?

umm, to try to explain better, like, i'll be using a spiral like path, and once it gets to the end of the path i want it to go around the path again, from the start, which will be touching the end so it wont "jump" across the scene...

sorry if you dont understand,, that's the best i can explain it right now...

you want the animation to keep cycling?

in the graph editor select all the attributes in the left hand window thing and then all the keys in the graph (so all points on the curve are selected)
then go Curves > Post Infinity > Cycle

i just tried it out now with a ball on a curve and it worked.

if it doesn't work for you then i didn't explain well enough :p

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

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LOL

ok cool, i get what you mean, i gotta do the same thing for the tire rotation, thanks man, dont know why i didnt think of tha :p