Hi!
I have red your post at the Java3D forum and i'am also very interested in that.
I also work on a software solution to skin meshes using a skeleton animation system, but i'm also very frustrated about the rendering speed.
So i would be thankful, if you can tell me your experience with that.
I havn't finished my implementations, only vertex-based mesh modifications and skeletal animations are ready to use (check out the screenshot).
If your are interested to exchange some ideas, please reply to this.
Best Regards! Alex
Oh, very nice image.
Unfortunately, I don't think that this program can be solved without resorting to native methods. Skinning is about crunching a lot of numbers quickly, which means that it ought to be handled with native routines.
The best scenerio (from my point of view) is to have a couple of extra classes added to J3D that would facilitate this. It would allow users to have the support and platform independance of Java, plus the speed and possible hardware acceleration. Otherwise, I'm either going to have to write my own native methods and be restriced to one platform and have lots of problems with distribution, or write everything in software and have it run really slowly.
My best aproximation of skinning so far is generating many keyframe meshes and linking them together in a Morph node. However, this causes some bad squashing between frames.
I'm afraid I'm stuck without taking some large programming detours that would undermine using Java in the first place. However, I'm sure it is possible for this problem to be solved. If any folks working with Sun want to look into this, or perhaps even start an open source process where everyone could contribute to this very useful extension, I think that would be the best option for everyone.
Mark McKay -- http://www.kitfox.com
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