Merge Vertex Animations

[liaocheng]

Hello
I have a feature request from our artist:
See this max file( max 2014 ):
http://www.effecthub.com/test/vertex_animation_group.zip
There are a lot of small objects with vertex animation.
For each object, I can convert it to Editable Mesh, and click AddAWDVertexAnimSource and add a clip, and export it to AWD file successfully.
But for this case, there are so many small object forming a complete animation. It's not convenient to set AddAWDVertexAnimSource for each object. What's more, the rendering performance is not good if there are so many objects.
The idea way is to export them as one object with the vertex animation.
Is there a way to merge them in 3dsmax ( keeping the animation at the same time), or do you think it's a good feature for the plugin, or we should implement this feature in Away Builder?
Thanks.

[80prozent]

Hey
Yeah. This is a very good feature request.
I was thinking about this, and my first intention was to merge the meshes in the 3dsmax plugin.
But in the long term i think it would be much better if the cpp-libawd would be capable of doing such merge operations, so that we could call awd.mergeBlocks(std:.vector<AWDBlock>& blocksToMerge);*
This way, in future it would be easy to use this feature into other AwayExtensions that are using cpp-libawd.

I just created a new Issue in the awd-sdk issue tracker, to inform about some changes to the awd-sdk that i am working on.

Cheers

Robin