I have recently been trying to figure out how the animation system works in stonehearth. I see that every object(or almost every one) that animates has a rig in the data/rigs folder. I also see they have animations/effects.
I watched a couple older streams of Tom going over animation and he says he uses a script he wrote to write out the animation info to the json.
Anyone familiar with adding animated objects via mods able to tell me how you went about it?
You have two options:
Bummer they’re just now switching to Maya rn.
I already use Maya and am quite familiar with it. 
I’ll see if there’s anyways to get similar things in maya as 3ds max.
I am having issues with the stonehearth.utility.animation file that you get from github.com. When I open the file, 3DS Max launches and I get an error message saying "File Open Failed: ". Am I alone on this or does anyone have a guess at what the issue might be? Thanks guys!
I was getting an error saying “cannot create file” with the same thing.
Though… It printed out everythng that was going to be put in the output file, so I just copied and pasted it from the error thing to the a json.
I’d suggest using blender?
Sure it’s mess of shortcuts, but it’s free and it gets the job done with no real quality loss
People don’t realize you can just apply for a student licence of Maya or Max, Autodesk aren’t going to sue you as long as you don’t make money, they don’t care if you are a student or not…
I don’t have an issue with Max, I already have 2015 Max and 2015 Maya.
But I used 2015 Maya occasionally for work, and I have a pretty decent understanding of the program(which makes getting tasks like animations done much quicker).
Not to mention in terms of Animating Maya is by far the superb program. Might be why Team Radiant is switching to it if what @Relyss says is correct, or it might be because Maya is the standard program used by Riot Games and they’d like it to be consistent across the board(incase people move from one office to another).
I think I’ll wait to do any mods including animations, or I’ll just write a script for Maya that essentially does what the 3ds Max script does.
I use Max for modelling because I prefer modifiers, I do want to switch over to Maya its just a matter of time and effort, I want to actually get good at modelling and animation before I make that switch anyway.
Also, I really hate Max’s default lighting shader where as Mayas is a cut above the rest.
3Ds Max has a variety of problems that end up ruining maybe a few hours of work at a time.
Max does have some tools that makes modeling better. But since in terms of Stonehearth all the modeling is done in qubicle/other voxel editors, there is no real benefit in the Max side.
Maya for animations is significantly easier to use, and a lot of the keybindings and controls are similar to other programs of the nature.