What is the best way to do Character animation? I will have a potential for a large (could be 20 or 30 or more) number of characters on the screen at any given time, all animated. (I am willing to LOD the characters as more than 10 or so come on screen if I need to, but I hope I can void that and have good performance).
I will have fully animated characters (exported from 3d studio max as 3ds files or my own format). Many characters will be based from the same model (identical or almost identical... model color changed, texture changed, or extra models added to the same Branch/TransformGroup to appear as clothing or items held) I see three options here: 1) Create each frame as a separate model and use switch groups. (Too much memory required) 2) Create each frame as separate point and texture coord arrays and call setCoordinates() and setTextureCordinates() every frame (same memory concern? Speed? Sharing issues?) 3) Create some mathematical formula for positionals (IK/Bones/some cool parametric placement function, keyframing).. (again speed issues? And again, could this be a sharing issue or will cloning techniques fix that?) When I export the characters from MAX, I don't plan on reading animation in from the file, if I need to change point arrays, I plan on creating my own format to hold the frames. If I need to do a switch group, I plan on loading a series of max files (and optimising!!). Am I looking in the wrong direction? Anyone have any insight into the issue? Thanks a lot Chad Zalkin =========================================================================== 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".
