Animate Proxy?

[hcpookie 3770]

I think I am running into a poly limit for my SOC-R boat. I am over 20k on the first model (SOCR boat has 5 gun positions) and I'm probably trying to put too detailed of gun models on LOD1.

I read in a few old threads that you can animate proxies. This would be *PERFECT* for my situation. Is there any explanation or example of how to do this?

Searching isn't yielding any leads for me. Apparently the Chinook miniguns are proxies, but from the config it isn't clear exactly how to map this out. The config shows:

			class RightDoorGun: MainTurret {
			body = "Turret2";
			gun = "Gun_2";

			class BackDoorGun: MainTurret {
			body = "Turret3";
			gun = "Gun_3";

... etc. per turret. So how does this map to a proxy? Is the proxy named "Turret2"? Does that animate the gun's features (muzzle flash, etc)?

[PuFu 4600]

Unfortunately, you cannot animate proxies (as in transfer an existing animation of the p3d that you want to use in another p3d as proxy). What you can do though is use proxies as you would use selections to animate it.

I'll give you an example:

a) if you create a turret in it's own p3d, and animate those individual parts (say the belt, the barrel moving back when fired etc) and want to get that in the boat p3d as a proxy, the animations won't work.

b) if you break the turret in the individual parts and get each of those parts as individual proxies, and setup the animations in for the boat p3d using those parts as you would use selections, it will work.

hope that helps

[hcpookie 3770]

Thanks for that explanation! I ended up finding over 6k faces to (!!!) remove from the different parts of the guns and it works now! Still I'm interested in the parts of the turret to animate. Could (b) for example be used to animate the ejected shells? I have yet to figure out the ejected shell animations and that sounds like it would do the trick.