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Animations

The Cobra engine uses two different kinds of animation formats: .manis containers with .mani animations and .banis containers with .bani animations. Extracted from OVL, you get the .manis and .banis.

Manis

.manis animations are sampled across all frames for different bones and transform channels. They are generally used for advanced character animation that requires dynamics, constraints or blending between animations.

Import

Select a target armature you want to animate before importing a .manis file.

Limitations

  • Most anims are stored as compressed data, which must be decompressed before being imported.
  • Not all anims decompress correctly. If an anim fails to decompress, you may see no keyframes at all or a distorted mess.
  • When anims do decompress, single keyframes or whole channels may still show unexpected distortions.
  • Decompression is fairly slow. Keep track on the progress by turning on Blender's console (Window > Toggle System Console) before importing. If you have to import the same .manis repeatedly, consider using the Manis Editor to decompress it once and for all.

IMPORTANT

To import compressed animations, the bitarray Python module must be installed in Blender's bundled Python.

  • Running Blender with administrator privileges, you can press the red button in the tools' settings (Edit > Preferences > Addons > Cobra Tools). Restart Blender after downloading.

    Installing Dependencies

  • If the automatic process fails, you can install the module manually:

    1) Open a command prompt (not power shell) with admin privileges in the following folder (your blender version may vary, of course): C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 4.0\4.0\python\bin

    2) In that prompt, run this command: python.exe -m pip install bitarray

    Installing Dependencies Manually

Export

Transforms in blender actions are stored relative to the armature, but absolute in .manis. As a result, .manis export must know which actions belong to which armature:

  • If you have a single action per armature, setting it as the current action in the Action Editor is enough.
  • To export multiple actions from an armature, stash them in the NLA Editor or the Action Editor.

Gotchas

  • Export does not read the keyframes directly, but samples the visual transforms across an action's frame range.
  • Constraints are automatically baked.
  • Bones are included as needed; bones that don't move during an action are automatically discarded.

Limitations

  • Export only produces uncompressed animations, which occupy a lot of disk space and RAM bandwidth in-game. The game uses compressed animations for almost everything.
  • If you plan on editing only some animations of a .manis, insert the modified (= uncompressed) ones into the compressed .manis file using the Manis Editor.

Scaling

A command line script is provided to scale compressed animations and ms2 models by a given factor. Call it from a CMD or PowerShell window like this:

CMD

python resize_manis_cmd.py [FOLDER] [SCALE_FACTOR]

python resize_manis_cmd.py "C:\Users\USER\Desktop\tiger" 1.4

Manis Editor

A GUI editor to manipulate .manis files.

Manis Editor

Use Cases

  • changing speed of anims
  • decompressing anims
  • renaming / deleting / appending anims

Banis

.banis animations hold rigidly sampled location and rotation keys for all bones in a model. They are generally used for simple building or character animations, such as:

  • guests
  • feeders
  • exhibit animals

Limitations

The transforms used by .banis are currently not fully understood. Import is experimental and close to expected for some .banis, but totally broken for others. Export is not useable in production.