SCION MORPHING

Scion Morphing in MAX

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The 'Morph' for a Scion unit is just another animation, but it means you have to do the 'Fin' animations for both ends of the morph animation.
The morph animation of the Scions is actually motions of a dummy object that's been tied into the verticies of the ship. This dummy object is moving and deforms the mesh that its tied to accordingly. This technique gives the Scions a more organic feel when morphing. (Note: you can use any animation method that works in BZ2 and dont have to animate via linked xform modifier to create a morph animation). Linked xform animations (They are also referred to as Inverse Kinematics or bones animations sometimes) are made like this:
  1. Create your object.

    2.  
  2. Apply an 'EDIT MESH' modifier.

    3.  
  3. Select VERTICIES (dots)

    4.  
  4. Select the verts you want the cube to move.

    5.  
  5. Apply a 'LINKED XFORM' modifier, you'll have to look in 'more' for it as it's not a button in the stock setup. At the very bottom of the LINKED XFORM rollout there's a button that lets you choose the 'control object' for the verts you chose.  Hit the button and select the cube you want to be the control.
As a side note, it turns out that using this method adds a greater strain to the BZ2 engine than other animation methods.  It seems that stretching the texture on the fly takes more CPU than it should.
Morphing ships should be linked to a dummy object, usually a small cube. Otherwise you lose the first piece in the link of objects.

Scion Morphing in Softimage Fishbone


This is only a intermediate information for myself, so I dont forget how I did it :) Lizard said he will do a Moprhtank tutorial so I will be happy to wait for it.
Untill then I lined up what I did to make the fancy silverish scion morph animation to work:
1. Create the model in one piece, add all HPs and assign all materials

2. Create a 2D chain of as many chains as you want

3. Get a cube (or any other shape, a null is also possible I think)

4. Skeleton--->group as skeleton and pick the cube (or null), it turns green

5. In the Schematic view make the joint you want to controll the parent of the cube

6. Select the model body and choose Skin-->global envelope and pick the 2D chain

7. Select the cube and choose Display-->ghost-->toggle selection to rend the cube invisible (not sure if only invisible in SI or also in BZ2)

8. Animate the cube with keyframes.

9. Export to XSI and your done :)