When we wrote our Milkshape importer and initial skin and bones system (which was posted to this list some time ago) we did just as you suggested. The skeleton is pulled out and separated from the animation, so that the same animation could be used against different figures.
But one of the problems with the various Halflife formats is that the animation relies on a reference skeleton, or a "neutral pose". This differs from a Character Studio -> Flexporter animation which encodes the animation data as a replacement for the bone's rotation and translation. The advantage of the latter approach is it is faster to map the skin to the bones since you don't have to unwind the neutral pose on each bone to get the bone->vertex mapping. We also wanted to apply the same animation to two figures which shared similar, but different skeletons. So for example if we broaden the shoulders a bit in a Biped we would still want to use the same animation. This of course is a problem if the animation data contains the skeleton itself as replacement joints. So we ended up supporing both types of animations. The next step is to turn Flexporter animations into delta changes, which makes applying animations to different skeletons much easier. David Yazel -----Original Message----- From: Kevin J. Duling [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 1:47 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [JAVA3D] Model Animation, (was: Re: [JAVA3D] Neverwinter Nights model loader) Yeah, animations are a problem. I'm still trying to decide how I want to handle Milkshape keyframes and present them in some sort of usable format for developers. I'm thinking of using a metadata file to go along with the model. Based on my limited experience with MD2 models, I'm guessing that breaking the keyframe information into blocks for IDLE, JUMP, WALK, RUN, etc. will be sufficient. Skeletons could be shared between models (all bipeds, for example) with one reusable behavior driven by this metadata. Has anyone else done something similar? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Artur Biesiadowski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 11:17 AM Subject: Re: [JAVA3D] Neverwinter Nights model loader > Robert Bergman wrote: > > Not I, but I'd love to hear about any developments > > people come up with in that area. > > Problem is with importing animations. Model itself should be quite > simple (I mean some work, but no showstoppers). But what with animations > ? I don't think that Loader interface gives any standard for that. Morph > group is not a solution for skeletal system. > > Artur > > =========================================================================== > To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body > of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help". > =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help". =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
