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floating_anim_tutorial

Creating a Simple Floating Animation


Sometimes even a simple animation can add a lot of life to an object in your game. In this tutorial, I will show you how to quickly and easily create a floating animation in the Voxel Editor. This type of animation is great for drawing attention to objects that can be picked up or as idle animations for flying/hovering creatures.

1) Open the model you'd like to create the animation for in the Voxel Editor.

2) Decide on a starting point for the vertical position of the model. For this example, I will start the object at a position of one voxel above the ground by clicking the “Shift Model Up” button on the Editor Tools panel.

3) Click the “Duplicate Current Frame” button on the animation toolbar (or press Ctrl+D) to create a copy of the current frame. The frame info should indicate that you are now viewing frame 2/2 (i.e. the second frame of 2 total frames).

4) Click the “Shift Model Up” button to move the new frame up by one voxel.

5) Click the “Duplicate Current Frame” button once more to create a third frame, then click the “Shift Model Up” button again.

You should now have three frames total, where the model in each frame is one voxel higher than the previous frame. Next we will set up the animation so it will automatically play in-game.

6) Click the “Add Animation” button (green circle with a plus sign on the animation toolbar).

7) Type “default” (all lowercase) into the “Name” text field, or click the magnifying glass button and select “default” from the provided list of predefined animation names. If you are creating this animation for a character, you will want to use “idle” (also all lowercase) for the name.

8) Ensure that the start frame and end frame values are set to 1 and 3, then select “Ping Pong” from the “Type” dropdown and “6” for the speed. The ping pong method will display the frames in order from 1 to 3, then switch the order and play in reverse back to the first frame, and so on. See Animation Types for more details. Click OK, then save your model.

Your floating animation has now been created! You can preview it by clicking the “Play Animation” button (white circle with a blue arrow next to the “Animations” dropdown on the animation toolbar). You can tweak the speed from the Model Properties panel, or even add more frames if you'd like the effect to be more pronounced.

Since we used the predefined animation name of “default”, this animation will automatically play for this object type as soon as the map loads. In the case of the “idle” animation for characters, the animation will automatically play whenever they are not performing any other action, such as walking or attacking.

floating_anim_tutorial.txt · Last modified: 2017/07/11 10:49 by justin