DCS - Simplest Mod making part 2 - Super basic animation!

So this is probably the most basic and simplest tutorial on Animating moving parts for dcs. obviously it takes a lot more to animate the gear properly but here is the most basic start for any beginner!
Fireblaze did a great video on animating that I am certain would be easier to understand than mine, so highly recommend checking that out too if you are confused by at all in this video! The link to which is here:    • Blender to DCS World - testing the animati...  

So firstly, the model I am using comes all as one model but I'm going to need to take the front gear off. Your models may already be seperated which will save a lot of time. So to select only the front gear, I go into edit mode to select the faces of what i will remove. Once i basically have everything i need, I right click and click on seperate which then makes the part a different item now. For the sake of this tutorial I selected the entirety of the front gear whereas in a usual situation, you would select the wheels as seperate as well as the steering hinge and suspension. If you are willing to put more time into making yours look good, this is advised highly.
I then add a bone to the gear, this will be the part controlling the animation. You need to connect the object to the bone and to do this I go into pose mode, select the object and then select the bone before pressing CTRL+P then going to bone relative. In dcs the resting state on animations like gear is retracted so Ithen move the gear back to what it would be like in the raised position. Also looking at this point to the model i'm adding this to, you can see that the front gear is animated to argument 0 which you will need to rememeber as that is what you are putting the animation to.

So once you have your Dope sheet out on screen with the Action editer sub section selected, you can start your animation. For ease of access i only make my timeline 100 long and starting from 0. As the start point of the gear needs to be raised, we start with it retracted. starting from 0 we add a key frame with a "locrot" (Can either be done by right clicking and inserting keyfram OR just hitting I on the keyboard. make sure you are in pose mode though!). This keeps our object in this spot at this time. As i am having an extra part on mine, I start this animation at 60 instead of at 50 so the other part has time to animate first. So we go to the 60 point and add another key frame with Locrot. then moving to the 100 part before moving the gear to where it would be fully lowered. Here we add another key frame with loc rot and that is the animation complete! you can watch back your movement to make sure it is all ok and adjust as needed.

Once this is done, make sure you have your argument set to what the argument would be for the part moving on the actual model you're putting your model onto and this is MOST important. make sure you have your bones under ONE root bone. This means that any bones NEED to be parented to the root. The way to do this is by selecting the bones in edit mode, and then selecting the root bone LAST before pressing CTRL+P and "Keep offset". once this is all done, it's been selected to export with the argument set, You can export this and now your model will have a fully animated part that will then transfer over to dcs!