Will there be support to import Collada DAE animation along with the meshes in BeamNG? Currently, I am able to import the model, skeleton (or what looks like connected nodes), and animation into BeamNG. When in the World Editor, it only plays the animation on the bones but the mesh does not follow. My hope is that I can import a biped model that is animated in Blender or whatever, then attach it to a vehicle and have it play out a loop of the animation. That would be something awesome. BeamNG definitely has animation controls built in, perhaps the ability is there but I can't seem to connect the dots?
Thanks for the feedback. Does that mean that even if I import a biped model with working animation, it would only work as a static object? I cannot attach it (with preserved animations) onto the vehicle?
Yes. Or on a vehicle as a prop mesh (not deformable). I'm quite sure flexbody meshes (deformable) cannot have animations.
Yes, flexbodies do not have any reference to the ambient animation. Looking at the props section in the wiki (https://wiki.beamng.com/Props), I cannot seem to find any reference to being able to play the ambient animation in the collada file. Am I missing something?
I'd like to preserve facial expressions and finer movement of the biped mesh. I hope the devs would look into adding functionality to the World Editor to allow attaching of animated meshes to vehicles - regardless of physics - I'd rather have it with no collisions. Maybe there is a way to do this in LUA scripting?
You can set nodes to be non collidable. For facial expressions you would just need nodes that move using hydros, which you can then control via LUA. You would set nodegroup upper lip for example and then have upper lip mesh bind to that group, so when those nodes move, that mesh moves or gets new shape. Kinda lot of work though. jbeam is kinda like bones, problem is of course added weight and mechanical design.
Totally get the concept of jbeam, but I just started BeamNG a couple weeks ago. It is a lot more work to chop up a mesh as I already have poseable character models to work with. Just last week, I finally got a chopped up mesh to replace the dummy model: I'll be honest, I rather avoid all of that work and just import an animation via Collada and attach it to the vehicle. Done and done. Jbeam is too much work with my limited time and my understanding of it is still shallow. Like you said, it is more work than needed. If LUA can reference the vehicle position and for every tick I have the static animated mesh follow the vehicle position, maybe it could be a workaround. I barely scratched the surface. Do you know if it can be done?
This should really be a feature in BeamNG - it would add some really dynamic scenes and setups for vehicles. The dream would be to do the following - for example in the World Editor: Import the Collada with animation Position it anywhere on a vehicle "Attach" it to the vehicle at that spot while it loops the animation (or controlled via LUA) I do not mind if the physics do not work on the imported mesh. I would pay more money for this game if it had said feature.
