heyas; i want to do a quickie little animation, just to get a motion blur deal on a still picture. so i'm at frame 0 or 1 or whatever, and i set up the start position of the animated items. now, i cant seem to be able to get to 1 second (or .5 or anywhere) to change the objects positions for the animation. they're not going anywhere, they're just some wings, flapping. i been all through the animation wizard thing, and i set the things for pendulum motion and 1 second duration in the animation toolbox thing, and i turned on animation thing in the materials/numericals/animations palette, and i even ungrouped the obj and linked the animated parts to the base part with the little animation linky thingy. but the part where it says grab the time indicator and drag it to one second... that sucker just won't move :/

It sounds like you're using the animation wizard. I've found it easier to do this sort of thing using the timeline instead (I assume you're talking about an up and down motion rather than a forward movement?). If that's the case, it's really simple. 1. In the wireframe view select the timeline from the toolbar (that little director's slate looking icon) and click on cancel when the wizard screen pops up. 2. On the left side of the timeline, just below the player controls, there are two decorated arrows. Click on the one on the far left. This will open the expanded timeline view. 3. At the very top of the timeline (where the numbers are) you'll see a little triangle pointing down. Move the cursor over this and you'll see a double ended arrow. Click and drag this item to the time spot you want. 4. In the wire frame view, move the object you want to change to the point where it should be at the time you have set. You should see the object name appear in the empty window on the lower left and there should be two upward pointing triangles just below the main timeline window with a thick yellow bar between them. These are your keyframe indicators. 5. Click on the "render preview" icon (the little filmstrip, not the camera) to the right of the timeline window. You can add keyframes, change the time, animate the materials or just the position, etc, by clicking on the + next to the object listed in the animation window. I found this a lot simpler for animating still objects and materials. For some reason, the wizard only wants to deal with forward motion rather than up and down or lighting changes. Hope this helps, Kate

heya; well, today i messed with animation tests and i found out my problem. i loaded the sample picture of the... you know, the tall one with the log and the frog and butterfly? for the background. for some reason, that image will NOT animate. when i hit the filmstrip thing, i get a weird error that says 'hint: you can only animate the first camera.' animating the figure for a motion blur thing worked fine, when i loaded it into a blank world. ::sigh:: thanks for the tips, though, kate! :)

this one threw me for a loop a while ago, and i sent the file to e-on thinking there was a bug (i believe the message you got is new, for my scene the camera just kept on bouncing back to it's original position with no error message). Key thing here is that only one camera can be animated (usually the main camera). So if animation is turned on for one camera (even if no keyframes are defined), when you try and play with another camera it won't work. My guess, from reading your original post, is that you had animation on for one camera, you had a different camera selected, then you tried to move the time slider, but it won't let you because that would be defining an animation for a different camera.

Well, smack me upside my silly head. grin I thought you were trying to animate the dragon, not the camera (DOH!). I just finished my first animation, now I just have to figure out how to compress it without messing up the colors. For some stupid reason, PSP6 wants to cut it down to 256 colors from 16 million (or whatever it is now) and that totally messes things up but 35 Megs is a tad large for an 8 second animation. Yeesh. Hope you're having better luck on yours, Bloodsong. Kate

You can compress your animation files directly in VUE3. Open ANIMATION RENDER OPTIONS and click at ADVANCED OPTIONS Then click at FILE FORMAT OPTIONS and choose CODEC CINEPAC DE RADIUS at 100 % Another way is to download XINGMPEG encoder. It makes stronger compressions in *.mpv format http://www.xingtech.com You can download a small animation I created (870 MB) at : http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Metro/3754/anivue.zip Regards, Guitta

wait wait wait wait wait! #1: what do you mean i can only animate the camera? this is vue 3, not 2 and everything can animate.... eh?? #2: i AM trying to animate the dragonfly's wings. #3: how do you 'create' a new camera? i looked and there isn't such a thing. do you mean saving different camera positions?? didnt think they were considered new cameras. so, i guess i'm back to my original problem. i didnt create the camera or the scene, i loaded a sample scene. it only has the one camera setting (FINAL). if there was a previous animated camera in the scene, it got deleted before the sample pic was saved for distribution. i guess.

heh heh heh. I just tried to recreate what you did, and I think you did run across a bug. But lets clarify a few things first. What I was saying is that you can only animate ONE camera maximum. Yes, I am talking about the different camera positions, but they can be considered different cameras. So, if you have animation turned on for one camera setting (say "main"), you can't turn on animation for another (say "camera 1"); you will get that message. Now what it looks like what happened here (my guess)is that maybe an animation was defined for a camera that was later deleted and you are now left with this "final" camera. Now, because the original camera was deleted, it now won't let you animate any other cameras and your stuck. I know that you were trying to animate an object, not the camera, but the whole camera things seems to have screwed up all animation (a definite bug). Maybe somebody else can figure out that this isn't a bug, and just some bizarre feature. -karl martin