OT : how to load animations (Bézier, TCB) from ASE files

[Morglum]

Hi !

Sorry for posting such an off-topic thread. I've searched 1 hour on google and this site and, although there are many ase loaders, there seems to be none that loads animations.

Precisely, my question is : how do you interprete the animation information found in ASE files (Bézier, TCB animations).
That is, how do you compute the animation path, from the few numbers found in ASE files.

There was no other place to post, sorry. Certainly not on maxforums : they are artists and don't care about the formulae behind Bézier animations.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Morglum

[Sundy]

Try Posting at http://sparks.discreet.com

Anyways, 3ds Max interprets rotation keys in a local coordinate system, You will find more information if you have access to the max SDK, or the max SDK help files which are available at the sparks site.

-Sundar

[Morglum]

thanks a lot, I'll see if I can find some information from here.

Morglum

[Morglum]

no...nope. It says to look into 3dsmax's help, where there is nothing very interresting. I wonder how you do guys to write an ase parser which also handles animations http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/ubb/frown.gif

[Ozzy]

Why don't you write a little plugin for Max?

[Morglum]

Why not ?
Still I'd need infos about how to take the bézier/tcb parameters and obtain the whole animation from them...

[bsenftner]

I never managed to get the bezier controller based animations to work correctly, but for the linear and TCB controllers:

a linear keyframe looks like:
*CONTROL_POS_KEY keyTime x y z

a TCB keyframe look like this:
*CONTROL_TCB_POS_KEY keyTime x y z t c b easeIn easeOut

Where keyTime is the time specified divided by *SCENE_TICKSPERFRAME given in the *SCENE header.

For information on calculating a TCB curve, check out: http://www.cubic.org/~submissive/sourcerer/hermite.htm

[Morglum]

Why, thank you _so much_ !
That ought to solve my problem with TCBs.
Morglum