I''m trying to make a simple battleship with 3 gun turrets. I have most of the model. It looks already quite nice but I still need to animate it. There are basically to types of turrets: 1. a gun turret - the turret spins and the gun moves up-down, left-right, and a machine gun turret,which has a limited spin and the machine guns move up-down only. How can I make this up and down rotation (for example in 3D studio). The machine gun looks something like ------o- where "o" is the place fixed to the side of the turret. Any idea how can I make the pivot point in the center of this wheel? Can I add multiple animation sets to a model? And this is more of a programming question: I''m going to export this model to .X file. Is it better to programatically make the animations of the models or to export a keyframed animation? Thank you very much in advance!

Bones maybe?

How do you mean bones? Isn''t that too advanced for such a simple task?

BTW Sorry for posting twice!

Move the piuvot by using "Affect Pivot Only" or similar under the hierarcy tab. Then use the defalt rotation to rotate around it''s pivot, having Auto Key pressed to make an animation.

Not sure what you mean by the last question, if you use a script to export or a tool that comes with the directx sdk to convert between 3ds - x the animation keys should automaticly be included.

Let''s call what I''m doing a 3D rts ''game'' although in fact it would be more like a tech test.

I can export my models as separated models: hulls, turrets, guns, tracks, chassis, etc. and then "attach" matrices to each object that would perform their movement.
Or I can create keyframed animations for each movement in a modelling program (3d studio most probably).

The modelling part (the creation of a simple low poly 3d model) was a quite easy and successful one but I don''t have any experience with animation.

Each movement should be separated from the rest: the turning of the turret left to right from the turning of the gun up or the turning of the turret right or the movement of the tracks etc.