A guy on Facepunch has responded saying the these export tools don't allow normal animations... that all animations require bones. I am currently trying to setup a basic armature and then I'll retest.

The guy on Facepunch is correct. Source only supports skeletal animation, and on top of that can't scale bones.

If you want motion like this you can export a vertex animation, but that's very costly and shouldn't normally be done. See the Scene Properties tab in Blender for help on that.

Alright, yeah I have been working for over an hour trying to fix this. I got rid of that shape animation and started from scratch and just put a single bone in there and parenty the mesh to the bone and animated the bone by moving it up on the z axis a little ways and then exported. still not working.

I will make another video after work today to show exactly what i am doing. Maybe it would just be faster for someone to do this. Make an entity from scratch and show from beginning to end and list all their project files. cl_init, init, shared, the qc file

The object doesnt need textures, just export it as a blank set of objects that dont have materials. Just super basic. just make the animation move and maybe rotate so there is some obvious change to be seen.

That might be faster than trying to constantly correct me. I am OBVIOUSLY doing something wrong and just telling me how to do it isn't working. Please and thank you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ksr6JwkAiKk

You're trying to use delta animation, which is an advanced feature intended for complicated organic models. For your purposes just defne the animation in the same way as you do the idle animation. Then in HLMV, instead of clicking the radio button change the first drop-down from "idle" to "animation".

Yeah, still isn't working. I was told to move the facepunch thread. It has been nailed down to an issue with modeling rather than programming.

https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1572529

I am still trying new things like making a new blender project with a single cube and a single bone and exporting that to an smd and then importing it in and animating it.... no luck on that either.