I am still flailing away at Kev's Mirage 2000 model and am looking to improve a couple of the VC animations. I'm working on the altimeter now. Currently it is set up with a single needle that rotates around the dial. It works, but there are a couple of things I want to fix to make it more usable:
1. Currently, the initial 0 state of the animation puts the needle in the wrong location. On the dial, it points at the 9 o'clock position where it should be at the 12 o'clock position at zero altitude. I can calculate the animation state to incorporate a rotational offset which corrects this, but it would be easier to rotate the mesh once to set the correct location corresponding to the 0 animation state. I've rummaged around the API Reference and the forums, but all I seem to find is information establishing the animation with MGROUP_ROTATE and establishing the range of rotation, but I'm not seeing how to do a one-time offset before establishing the animation.
2. I'd like to see if I can copy (and possibly scale) this needle to make a new animation to indicate the 10 km scale. I've read a lot of stuff that sounds promising but it devolves into a lot of parent / child terminology and warnings of bad things if done incorrectly which I'm having trouble grokking.
Thanks again!
1. Currently, the initial 0 state of the animation puts the needle in the wrong location. On the dial, it points at the 9 o'clock position where it should be at the 12 o'clock position at zero altitude. I can calculate the animation state to incorporate a rotational offset which corrects this, but it would be easier to rotate the mesh once to set the correct location corresponding to the 0 animation state. I've rummaged around the API Reference and the forums, but all I seem to find is information establishing the animation with MGROUP_ROTATE and establishing the range of rotation, but I'm not seeing how to do a one-time offset before establishing the animation.
2. I'd like to see if I can copy (and possibly scale) this needle to make a new animation to indicate the 10 km scale. I've read a lot of stuff that sounds promising but it devolves into a lot of parent / child terminology and warnings of bad things if done incorrectly which I'm having trouble grokking.
Thanks again!