[Tutorial] Simple Animated Object using Blender

[Skuggasveinn]

Hi all.

I've gotten several request over the months to make a tutorial on how to create animations for Log, some of you PM'ed here or asked on YouTube after the trailer for my next mod went live and asked me how I made the "Swinging Gauntlet Axes", so I sat down and tried to make a tutorial explaining this.
This is like the modeling tutorial I made some months ago, just one take, me rambling in broken english and making mistakes along the way
Keep in mind that I'm not a "pro", I'm just a guy who looks at youtube tutorials to learn by myself, so this is just my way of doing this.

So what we are making is a spear trap for the Temple Tileset using a button asset to animate it.
1. We use the existing models from the asset kit, so no deep modeling knowledge is needed.
2. We use Blender thats free
3. We use Grimrock Model Toolkit, and GrimFBX, both free tools created by JohnW from this community.
4. We go through the entire process of taking a .model file from the asset kit, convert it with GMT to obj, bring it into blender, set up the animation scene and how to create your own rootnodes in blender, how to animate the object, export it out to FBX, how to use the GrimFBX to convert it to .model and .animation file, how to bring it back into the GMT and rename the animation, save it out again and bring it into the game engine.

all in all this runs for about 45min.
Hope this is of some use, and as always just ask if my rumblings don't make sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8zqGsbx-5o

Skuggasveinn

[petri]

This is great stuff! Not only for modders, but I can see what parts of modding support needs to be improved for LOG2. Thank you for making this tutorial, Skuggasveinn!

[AdrTru]

Thank you for totaly useful tutorial.

[JohnWordsworth]

Excellent tutorial! Great to see a clear and concise workflow for adding animations to Grimrock (without paying out thousands for 3DS Max) and a clever use of the button object class to add arbitrary animation to the game. I'm looking forward to animations being easier to add in LOG2, but even then - much of this tutorial will still be useful as the workflow and general methods are clear and concise. Great job!

It's also useful for me to see GrimFBX in use as I've only based it on 'theoretical' use-cases so far. All information that will be very useful in making the 'GMT2' all the more easier to use. I'll definitely consider the Root Node issue for instance (although, I'm glad it works regardless in this one!).

[maneus]

Fantastic turtorial, skuggasveinn.
Thank you very much for the time you´ve spend into that turtorial.

Your turtorial came circa a week after I´ve created my first object animation and integrated it successful into Grimrock.
But in your video their are surely a few things I can learn from.

I found the fact that object animations in Grimrock work only as a button, a pressure plate or a lever is a great pity.