Binding animation to an object rotation instead of keyframes in Lightwave?

SebastianP

I'm building a fairly large series of WW2-inspired spaceships in Lightwave 11, which are armed more or less identically (in principle) to the original ships - i.e. lots and lots of machine guns. Previously, my attempts at animating these things have been fairly simplistic, pretty much just a hypervoxel emitter with a stairstep curve and infinite repetition to make it fire, which let me kill the gunfire by hiding the emitter. My latest models are a fair bit more detailed, and have individually recoiling barrels etc, which makes this method a lot less useful - if I want to be able to cease fire, I either have to copy each animation cycle manually, or come up with a different way of doing things.

The two solutions I can come up with is either making some form of script - "on 'fire', do all of the following:", or binding the animation to a spinning control object, so I can halt the cycle by halting the object.

Now, I'm fairly sure this is covered in one of William Vaughan's tutorial vids - but I don't know which one(s). Could someone point me in the right direction here?

Cheers!

count23

Use hypervoxels as you have previously but instead of hiding the emitter (this'll hide all active particles too) use keyframes on the emitter amount so that when you dont want it to fire, the emitter is releasing 0 particles and when it needs to fire, the keyframe is set to 1 particle per frame (or however many frames you want between shots).

SebastianP

There are eight or more keyframes involved in firing each gun - the barrel has four for the recoil animation, and the muzzle blast and hypervoxel emitter have two (or three?) each. Copying all those manually would take forever - the smallest of my ships have well over forty guns each, and the biggest ones have over two hundred. What I want is the ability to build a simple control panel to direct which guns are firing, and have them use their complete animation each time...

count23

You dont need to copy them manually, you can copy+paste keyframes themeslves (Select your entire firing keyframe timeline and copy the whole lot) and then use shift select to move them forward and back alone the timeline in a group. If you create a single keyframe for one firing event, you should just need to copy+paste into all your guns as you want htem to fire.

Your only other option is to write a script as you mentioned above. But copy+pasting keyframes is the simpler solution, especially if you've never programmed or scripted before.