Hi all, I need a way to mass-import and assign animation frames (or maybe a massive animation script) TL:DR; How do I gain access to automate poinTools. I want to take our animations using poinTools a step further and add animations. Just simple ones.. Movement! But lots and lots of it! I see the ability to add animation is available, and there is even some kind of scripting tool to aid. But.. I want to do traffic animations, cars, people walking, trains. I need to add perhaps a thousand actors and I don't see any way of achieving this without spending weeks manually importing each actor as a point cloud and adding the animation controller!? 1. Is there a way of mass importing , lets say twenty, different one-car-per-point-clouds , and clone them to the thousands needed? Can the scripting tool do anything?.. I like to script. But as I see it, what is available is not worth much? As it is, to add a script to just a single actor , I would need to copy and paste the script of choice into the Motion Properties notepad area, and click an "enabled" button and possibly depending on the Motion Script engines capability, edit a few variables and assign a path to the script. This is all fine and nice if I was just trying to do a single animation. But expecting success with a thousand scripts and their individual setups is just plain crazy. 2. Is there a way of accessing any/all animation controllers from a single script? Then perhaps I could write the mother of all scripts matching each car with one of a dozen predefined paths depending on the car-point-cloud name and place them along the path depending on the frame number. Possible indeed. But for that I need another thing working I suspect: 3. - How do we rename a point cloud? - I noticed that ALL of my point clouds seem to have the same name (internally), well, the POD file varies, but inside the POD they are all named after the TXT file they originated from - and that name was the same for all my clouds. This turned out to be a problem. The animation controllers threw a fit because of this. I wanted to set different point-sizes to all my clouds in the PTL and ended up having to use just one animation controller - as I couldn't add any more. I had to do it like this: Set the point size. Reassigning the animation controller to another cloud. Set the point size.. and so on.. poinTools kept the point size setting somewhere beyond my reach! Oh the horror.. I can work around some of this by re-exporting all my clouds making sure my TXT files are named differently. No problem. But with regards to re-using a single vehicle-point-cloud, cloned over and over and over, I suspect the animation-controller will have a serious fit. 4. (My preferred method actually) How do we mass-import animation frames to a lot of animation controllers? Seeing as I have successfully imported frames to control the camera, straight from microStation - following a path, looking ahead, keeping a proper speed throughout the animation, complete with tilting and all - I believe I can create and export the transformations for a single or all animation objects the same way: Each vehicle would get the proper position, rotation (on all axis!) and would keep a proper speed though the animation. Actually, I will prefer to do all the maths in microStation and pre-calculate all frames to import into poinTools. Regards, Torben
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