External : (Skeletal Only)?

In the animation export dialog there is this section called External : Skeletal Only. It's all grayed out at my end. I thought this would let me isolate specific bone groups for animations so I could then overload animations in Ogre.

I'm currently animating a flying creature and I've separated the wings and head movement into different timeframes with the idea of overloading them in the game. Unfortunately the fact that the wings don't move in the head movement timeframe and the head don't move in the wings timeframe means that both animations get attenuated when I overload them.

Was this dialog meant to be a feature to address this? Is it still being developped (thus being grayed out) or is because there's something I don't get.

Thanks!

Cheers!

C.

I heard something like your case in the main forum.
Someone was trying to animate a dragon with more than 24 bones (ogre limit if didnt remember bad), search in the forum, and if you find it, post it.

He tried this.
Hide bones that dont want to export, and then export one part. show & hide the other part...

In the ogre app you have to use: sharedSqueleton I dont know where is it & i cant find it now (I'm in the university) I will try to find the post and all info related this night.

gl!

The "External" option in the animations dialog if for creating separate files for selected animations, either single animation in a separate file, or a group of animation in a separate file, so you can save the skeleton (with common animations if you want) and have separate animations that you can load and add to your skeleton in your application

With this feature you dont need to have a skeleton file with all animations in it, this saves resources in your application as you can load and apply the animation relevant to your character in a specific scene and dont need to load all the animations at the skeleton load

And as you can save the skeleton and the animation separated, you dont need all your character animations to be in the same max scene, in the same timeline, next to each other

You dont need to always export the skeleton with all animations, most of the time you export new animations as your project needs it to separated files

What I finally did to overload animation is convert the skeleton to XML, edit out the unwanted bone in the different animations and reconvert. Practical for prototyping and proof of concept but I guess it would be kind of error-prone in a full blown development environment.

Dragon with 100 bones.
I cant find the post when he was creating the dragon and have problems to export, this one is when he try to optimize the dragon in ogre.
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... mit+dragon


what you want exacly?
1. diffenrent skeletons files with diferent animations (1 skeleten, 1 animation)
or
2. different skelentos with diferents bones (because you overpass the 24 limit)

1. In ogre it's not a good idea. Because each skelenton file have information about the bones structure and the animations. Others format like SMD (not supported) have a bones info in one file, and animations in the others (all with the same extension, used in HL).

2. You have to search i have limited time. But you can ask it in ogre forums because is a ogre related more than export related.