Phantom [3D] Animation Technology
Open Public Beta 0.1 [03/5/09]

Name: Phantom Animation Technology Beta 0.1
Genre: Application
Developed In: Game Maker 7 Proffesional
Thus compatible with the following systems;
Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7

Application Information:
Phantom Animation Technology is a specially designed animation suite designed for use with Game Maker to make the creation of 3-dimensional games and sequences much easier. The project was inspired by the lack of extendable and customizable tools available for this particular field of development. The original project was started and havily developed by Phantom107, however, deep into development he encountered problems with Gimble Lock and the way the bones reacted. After long conversation, he allowed me to "adopt" the project and I was able to fix the errors and add new functionality into the program. After 2 weeks of additional debugging and rescripting, we present to you, Phantom Animation Technology - a breakthrough in the future of 3D Game Maker animation.

Screenshots & Previews:



Download Information:
The following links lead to the 0.1b Beta of Phantom Animation Software (~1.25mb). Please choose the appropriate mirror;

Media-Fire
Beta 0.1
Beta 0.1b

WHFF: Will Host For Food
Beta 0.1
Beta 0.1b

Roket-Games
Beta 0.1
Beta 0.1b

Please note that as the downloads page gets updated, in order to keep your work compatible with each newer version, you should reopen and resave. This is neccecary as each version may have a slighly different save format as the last, and to preserve the lightweight size of the application, back compatibility may only be present for the version before.

Todo list:
- Add in areas that are "under maintainance"
- Review decimal formatting and weird glitches in GM string() function
- Add alpha transparency option for individual bones
- Allow import of .obj models (currently writing "slimmed down" version of MasterXilo's script)

Credits:
Lead Programmers; Schyler, Phantom107.

Final Remarks:
To aid the development of this project, post all bugs and reviews in this topic as well as general comments and questions. The application is compressed using a special method, while at the same time keeping its Vista Compatibility (3rd party tool). Because of this, it is known that some non-admin Vista users running UAC may recieve warnings and may not be able to run it. PM me for an uncompressed version of the latest stable build.

Greatest Regards,

Schyler

I'm glad Schyler took the effort to fix my near-completed animation editor.
Turned out I was overlooking some awkward problems.

I put a lot of effort was into this, and I think it shows.
Schyler deserves credit too, if he hadn't fixed it it would be abandoned.

I hope a lot of users can benefit from this!

wow, this looks really good!
I will maybe use it if it has all the formats I need

just having a quick look...
great
a annoying thing i found was that when you rotaded the bone in animation editor the mouse could select a different bone (by number)
a suggestion for the bone editor is to have it a whole number (without decimals) when dragging it around
a help file would be nice too

other than that great

edit: found a bug:

happened when i clicked insert keyframe on the 2nd frame. pressing ignore led me back to my model. (happens whenever i insert a new frame)

Interesting. I've had alot of errors in the past about "frame" and I thought they were all gone. Good job for spotting that one

The bone selection while rotating is easy and will certainly be fixed in the next release.

Cheers,

Schyler

I downloaded it, it is really professional.
here are some suggestions:
a file menu bar . with load, save and other stuff,
the ability to import and export models, in other formats
when you use the scroll thingy to zoom, it should zoom in to the scroll thingy, not the center

*** UPDATE ***

Attention: It has just been known the application was previously severely bugged and you were not able to play frames (limiting the usefulness of the program to none). This was a massive mistake on my part. I accidentally clicked in the room editor and put the control instance in the room twice. The new beta (FIXED), 0.1b has been included in first post and also here. Try the animation editor now!

Check first post.

You really should post this or reference it in other sections. It's too good to stay hidden here, and people coming here don't really need/look for this. As you said 3D may be better.

Kind regards,
Christian Sciberras.

This is really good.
I couldn't try it for long, but it's good, from what I saw.

I liked this, although I really have no use for it I'm sure many others will benifit from it, and it was certainly a good bit of fun.

great tool if you're into 3d.

how long before someone makes a full polygoning editor like maya in GM?

Might very well be extended into this as a full suite. Depends how much time I get on the project.

PS; I added a WHFF mirror to first post.
Edit; Also just added roket-games link for Beta 0.1b

Doesn't look too bad, it's easy to use - as it should be- the animations "do what they should do", and it altogether works pretty smooth..

Biggest drawback is probably the inability to export the animations currently (and this should've really been fixed BEFORE you release it as a "post-wip")

Also I would love to see it possible to connect bones: like connecting 12 bones so they make a cube. - this would of course limit the freedom in the animation a lot. However if you could also make it so that bones are "resizable" during animation (and possible define bones as "resizable" or "not resizable") would fix also this problem, and make complete animation/translations possible.

With the animation editor you can still improve the UI a lot:
-Clicking an empty frame should ADD a new keyframe (probably copied from the previous keyframe).
-Clicking an "interpolated" frame should also ADD a new keyframe (but instead copied from what the interpolation would show)
-When having selected a keyframe pressing 'delete' shoud delete that frame.
-You should make a hot-key to go back to the default look-angle for the preview. (suggestion: pressing left mouse button while holding right button)
-Left clicking at the preview (in the animation window) should, -if clicking at a bone- select that bone for editing..


Well these are the things that I found to be bad at top of my head... But overal it's already pretty nice!

Looks very good and will download now and edit when I am done...

Edit: Looks good, menu/display is not too distracting but not too bland and the functionality is also good. A help file would be a good addition aswell to help people who can't figure stuff out quickly. Great job!

Expect an update this afternoon. I'll get around to some of the suggestions above, but clearly some of them need some fine tuning. Instead of a single left click, maybe double click can hotkey to insert a frame?

Nicely done

The applications is nicely designed. The visual interface/GUI is very good. The application has a nice clean look to it as well and doesn't have 1000 buttons tricking and annoying you in the process of making an animation. This would be great for a beginner to pick up and not get overwhelmed unlike in most 3d Modeling/Animating Programs out there.

Nicely done.

Holy crap this is awesome! This is a total break through for game maker! Once I get better at GM3D I am definitely going to be using this. I just need to get some practice with the built in functions first.

In all honesty, this program offers very little new material. It's just the same old method of animating (frame-by-frame recording of rotations, scaling, and translations), but just lets you put more than 1 into a scene, and also tweens between keyframes.

Please, add something new and fancy. First of all, I highly recommend including some demo animations. Next, onion skinning would make this much more usable. (Show all other keyframes, faded out, in the same view).

All in all, it's a very professional program, and I applaud you on that. However, it's just the same old tricks to animating, and that is something I don't like. Frame-by-frame, I mean, come on.

This is a great program and once you add the ability to export animations and allow me to import my models for use with the bones, i will definitely be using this in my game. Best of all its super easy to use, just fiddled around for a few minutes and was able to make some nice animations really really quickly.

I would have to say that this is probably the best animation program for gm out there as far as ease of use goes.

One thing that i didn't like was not being able to view the frames between key frames. And like Mitch said onion skinning would be an awesome addition so definitely add that.

Will definitely be checking this topic regularly.

Awesome! Totaly sophisticated!
I am having an issue through. You see rotating a bone on the X axis gets the same result as if you rotate it on its Z axis.
Please help.
P.S. where can i find the manual?

That's rather bizzare. Can you send me the savefile you used and maybe screenshot the bone? Maybe just a typo somewhere in the code.

Regards,
-Schyler-

Savefile? uhh... It's not just happening in a specific file.
If I just open up the program with the default settings and rotate the default bone on its x axis, it does this-

I just tried redownloading the program from rocketgames and...
Same x axis glitch.