This is a utility to preview characters and character animations.*

Source:  CharacterViewer.zip

Often you want an artist, who may or may not have a Virtools development license, to be able to export a character with an animation and be able to preview how it looks without having to rely on the Virtools programmer to integrate the character into your game.

*Caveat:  This utility is not designed to load a character into an online web-based game, it is intended to be used from the artists desktop (and will only work in that offline way).

Usage instructions:

1. Download and extract the zip file. It contains these files:

 

2. Replace Character.nmo with your character file which also contains an animation. (This setup doesn't allow you to check out multiple character animation- just the one that is in the file).

3.  Use the arrow keys to rotate around the character and to zoom in and out.

Source Code Tutorial

Here's info on the setup of the source .cmo in case you want to modify it for your needs.

The high level idea is to load our external character, attach a Character Controller BB to it, and then aim the camera at the character.  Object Load BB is used to load the character and get a reference to the character.  Then we use Attach Script BB to attach a character controller script.  More on this in a bit.  Finally we use Send Message BB, to pass a reference to the character to the camera so that the camera knows what to point at.

The trickiest aspect of this utility is that you want to attach a Character Controller BB to a dynamically loaded character.  For whatever reason, Attach Script BB doesn't let you attach stock BBs to an object.  Instead it lets you attach an existing script to a new object.  So....  the script which contains the Character Controller BB must first exist somewhere so that we can reference it as the script to copy via Attach Script BB.

This is where the need for a dummy character comes in.  By having a dummy character in the file, we can create a script on it which will later be copied onto the character that we load.  The dummy character is hidden and never seen.

Below is the script that is on the dummy character.  The basic component is the Character Controller BB which triggers the first animation on the character.  This first slot is called "Idle" in the Character Controller BB, but you can call it anything you want and the animation itself could be walking, dancing, or whatever other animation that your artist wants to preview. The bulk of the work being done in this script is to get a reference to the animation that is on the character.  By default, all of the animations in the Character Controller will be --NULL-- so we need to get the collection of animations off the character, then grab the first animation from the collection and play that.  The character will just have one animation in the collection, but this was the first way that came to mind to grab a reference to it.

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