animation of robot arm

I have a simple robot arm which consists of a rotating base, a lower arm which is a child of the base and an upper arm which is a child of the lower arm. I created key-frame animation for each section and exported the animation as separate files.

I am now trying to get things to work correctly in T3D with little success.

When I play a lower arm animation it always turns the rotating base to a default position which is not what I want. When I move the upper arm it always moves the base and the lower arm to default positions. I have tried using the Blend feature when creating the sequences in the shape editor, but this does not appear to change anything.

Any help / suggestions will be appreciated.

I think it is the typical use case of blend.

and I think the shape editor (at least in 3.8) can't show the final (blended) sequence, it show only the offset of the sequence. I always need to go in to game to see the blended result.

I went into game and sent playThread from console and it still has the same problem

First be sure for the animation ("blendable" animation) to be tagged as a blend animation. You can change that in the shape editor.

http://docs.garagegames.com/torque-3d/official/content/documentation/World%20Editor/Editors/ShapeEditor.html#Properties_Window

If I remember correctly you need a "root" animation for the Blend sequence. I did that sequence just a pair of frames of all the bones "keyframed" from the starting pose.

The "blendable" animation has the not moving bones the same as how appear for the "root".

Hmm, I don't remember in you have to keyframe all the bones or just the moving bones for the "blendable" animation. I'll check later.

I've checked and it seems how you keyframe doesn't matter but I think I've found your issue.

You need for the threds to be in different slots, that's:

robot.playThread(0, "rotation");

robot.playThread(1, "movearm");

If you use the same slot you destroy the previous animation (rotation in your case) so you don't have a base to blend and just plays the animation.

@irei1as thank you that solved it :)

Now I just need to figure out why when the arms move they go from being at 90 degrees to the base to being parallel with the base even though the root pose is correct :shock: