Animated Shutters :: Rigges
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For this tutorial, I will assume you have a working knowledge of MOHRadiant. This tutorial deal with creating animated shutters, similar to those used in m5l1a.

Right, I'll go right to the good stuff. First of all, make your house. This isn't a house tutorial, so I'll not get into details about making a house. Needness to say, you are going to need some windows on it. For this tutorial, I have created the front end of a house. It has 4 windows, each in the same group number. you will see a use for this later.

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Part 1 : Normal Movement
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Once you have your windows created, you want to create shutters for those windows. To do this, just create a very thin brush with a shutter texture such as (central_europe/shutter_set2). The brush should be at the edge of the window coming out away from the window, as in the picture below. You need to have it at this angle for the animation to work correctly, otherwise it will seem as though the shutter goes into the wall as it moves. Make sure the edge of the shutters join flush with the wall also, to give the best effect.

Now the key part. We need to create a point of origin for the window to move. Just like when creating a door. The point of origin is created using the origin texture from common textures. create a brush just inside the edge of the window that touches the wall (this is the same area of a hindge would be in reality). See the image below for a better idea of what I'm talking about. The blue rectangle is the shutter itself. The red rectangle is the inner area, just inside the blue rectangle, that is the point of origin.

Ok, we are almost there now. With the shutter and its point of origin selected together, right click on the edit area, on the shutter and select script/object. This turns the whole object (point of origin and all) into a scripted object for the shutter script to work from. At this point, click "N" and enter a key/value of targetname/lshutter, if it is the left shutter otherwise a key/value of targetname/rshutter if it is the right shutter. Finally, for the level editor part of it. Enter a key/value of #group/1. Where 1 is the group of these shutters currently being created. It is a good idea to have a different group number for each wall of windows.

Now for the script part. Don't worry, this is a lot easier than my last tutorial. For this, it is simply one line.

Thats it. Each and every left shutter should be called lshutter, and every right shutter should be called rshutter, so they respond correctly. Put all this together with a bit of rain, and you have a great effect. (sounds and all)

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Part 2 : Slam the Shutters
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Ok, this part is easy. Its just a little extra something you can play around with. It is simply a line of script that works with the shutter.scr, script. It is used in the game when a missle flys past the windows or there is an explosion. Here is that little line:

One last point of interest. The number "1" at the end of that last line of script, is the group number that we added earlier. As we numbered the group 1 earlier, then we add 1 at the end of this line of script. simple huh? Thats it. You now had shutters blowing in the wind, and you can stam them when you want.

The first section of code is basically the same as before, the main difference is a loop, which is used to step through each point of the camera view as it travels along the path. Not to bad? Just read the code and it should make enough sense for you to use it! Hey, it works for me.

Final words. Well, this is a simple enough tutorial when you know how, but it is just to make sure everyone will know how its done. Best of all, it adds great atmosphere to your levels.

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