Got motivated today and decided to work on the animation a bit more. With quite a bit of tweaking, I was able to get Cinema 4D (which I just finished writing an extensive review, so watch for it) and Emotion 3D to play nicely. Emotion 3D's 3DS-importer is horribly broken, so I stuck with the .X importer. It works a bit, but it can't deal with textures, only solid colors. This wasn't much of a problem, as the only "necessary" textures were on the dozer's eyes. I rebuilt the dozer's eyes out of three spheres (white, blue, and black), and did a little work with boolean operators and cylinders and was finally able to make a reasonable-looking eye without textures. I also made the model a tad simpler, for one getting rid of the translucent windows, which would've been a pain to animate over a background.

I then had to fiddle with C4D, as it makes the positions of objects by default relative to the object. Like if you create a cube, the origin of the cube will be in the center of the cube. The 3DS model I had, though, had all objects' origins at an absolute point 0,0,0. It took me a bit to realize this was what was happening. When I exported my dozer, you wouldn't see his newly-created eyes. Turns out the eyes were there, but they were being moved to point 0,0,0, which was in the center of the dozer itself. Once I figured out that's what was happening, it was an easy task to move the objects' origins to the same spot.

It took quite a bit more fiddling than that, but I did get the dozer animating the way I want.



Which brings me to the animation itself. I need your opinion. At the following link is the animation resulting from my aforementioned struggle with the tools. One thing I can do is make a thick black "outer border" on the object. I rather like it, as it reminds me a bit of the kind of effect you see in animation nowadays (like in the Powerpuff Girls or that Clone Wars series).


Take a look at the animation on the following page and tell me (1) what you think of the dozer (color, design, etc) and (2) which animation you prefer (with or without border)

http://members.gamedev.net/johnhattan/diary/dozerdancetest.html

Thanks in advance for your opinion.