Anim8or Community

Enhancement request for Anim8or v1.01.1363:

Please make it possible to copy and paste the text that's in the "If you want to..."  Error/Warning popups.

(I'm guessing that the box is supposed to be titled something like "If you want to know...", but its title is being truncated for some reason. A bug, perhaps? There certainly seems to be enough room in the popup's title bar.)

I haven't checked the other Error and Warning popups, but it'd be nice if copy-and-paste were available for them, too, if it isn't already.

In particular, I'd like to be able to copy and paste the file name which is shown in the
"If you want to..." popup which is used to display the names of missing textures while Anim8or is loading a model.

Background: I recently copied a .AN8 model file from one directory to another so I can use it in a new project. Unfortunately, it references many textures which I need to copy, too, and I'd like to make a list of them. I'd rather not replicate the entire original directory since it contains many irrelevant files.

See the attached screengrab.

Although your results suggest that it might not be relevant, what graphics hardware and drivers are you using? I'm wondering if there might be an incompatibility issue there, too.

Some rendering engines (e.g. Celestia's) handle arbitrarily large images by cutting them into pieces which fit into the card's texture buffer. I dunno how they persuade the graphics hardware to merge them into contiguous surface textures, though.

Just as a test, you might try importing the original 3DS mesh to Anim8or and then exporting it again (to a different name) and try loading that exported mesh into coppercube. Does that work as you expect?

A quick Web search of the coppercube forum found some posts which imply that coppercube is very picky about 3DS file formats. (e.g. 3DS meshes created using Blender didn't work but 3DS meshes created using 3D Studio Max did work.) It might be that Anim8or's 3DS export format just isn't compatible.

Also, a quick test using a .3ds mesh exported from Anim8or in another display program (Celestia) suggests that some rendering engines do not support applying separate materials to different surface patches of a 3DS mesh. Instead, you might have to use Anim8or's UV editor to color the patches using regions selected from the surface texture image.

Are you willing to specify the game engine that you're working with?

Is it available for download somewhere?

Sometimes fresh eyes looking at a program's specifications can discover something that's been overlooked.

(Some of my comments below reiterate some of what you've written, although perhaps in a slightly different context.)

Some game engines provide an explicit "glow" or "emissive" specification in their object definition language which causes shadows not to be cast on an object and/or lets it act as a light source. You might look into that possibility. Some support it as an option in an object's mesh specification. Anim8or's Material editor includes this option, for example, which might or might not be supported by the format that you're using to export the mesh. You should try that if you haven't already.

WRT your first problem:

Anim8or's UV tool provides several surface texture image mapping projections, but they're sort of "hidden". You're seeing the results of the tool's default "Planar Projection"

To get a popup menu of the UV tool's projection options, use the Left Mouse Button to select (double-click-on) the object that you're working with. You'll then get a popup menu which allows you to select one of four different projections. I think you'll get better results with "Spherical projection".  See the screengrab below.

WRT your second problem:

How an object's surface reacts to an external light source (e.g. blackening one side of an object) depends on the 3D rendering engine used in the game software. You might have to provide multiple light sources or change the overall illumination level to get your object to be colored the way you want.

The translation of "black" to "transparent" that you mention might be an example of an engine-specific rendering option. Some rendering engines provide several different ways to apply an opacity image. Some examples are to use it as the opacity channel in a surface texture image, as a material's over-all opacity value, or as an explicit value in the game engine's object definition language.

I know of two different ways that Anim8or itself supports to make an object all or partially transparent. One is to provide an appropriate image in the Alpha (Opacity) channel of a PNG surface texture as mentioned above.  Another is to explicitly set the value of the "Trans" value of a Material using Anim8or's Material editor. This latter might or might not be supported in the exported mesh format or by the game's rendering engine.

FWIW, there also are 3rd party UV editors, although I have no experience with them.

To make the old rotation function be the default, select this menu item:

Options --> Debug --> Use Original Arc Rotate