-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Wow, it seems like there are more people working on this than we had > thought. I'm still new to open source programming; How the heck do we > harness all this beautiful work? > > It seems to make sense, since any simulation/game wants animated > life-forms. Character animation is one place that DirectX has an obvious > advantage to OpenGL. It'd be great to change that. >
To clarify - DirectX provides only for skinning which is probably 10% of the whole problem. Properly animating the characters is a quite a bit more than that. A good start to have something more comprehensive available would be to integrate the work of Vladimir into the upstream osgCal and then replace the rendering code in ReplicantBody with osgCal. That should give everybody a reasonable starting point for character animation and it shouldn't be too hard to do. Things that would still remain to be developed/fixed: - - proper LOD support in Cal3D - - exporters - - support for procedural animation in Cal3D and Replicant. That is needed for things such as walking, reaching, grasping - canned keyframe animations are not good enough or you need a specific animation for every object you want to grasp. That is perhaps possible for somebody like Ubisoft or EA with their army of designers, animators and motion capture actors but not people writing simulators. Other interesting things to do for which the theories and algorithms are known: - - proper skin rendering using bump mapping, sub-surface scattering model, etc. This is why HalfLife 2 characters looked quite good up close. - - rag doll dynamics (needs support in Cal3D - do you see why I have said that Cal3D may need to be redesidned/replaced?). This also needs support in the design pipeline to assign masses and collision volumes. - - support for forward dynamics (physically *controlled* motion, not only rag dolls-like tumbling) - - support for facial animation (quite a big deal, actually - properly animating the face can be more complex than the rest of the body) - - clothing simulation - unless you want your characters looking like Superman in a skintight spandex costume you need some simulated clothing. That is a whole another can of worms computationally. - - hair simulation - not everybody is a closely cropped marine. Again, another big computational problem :( Jan -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mandriva - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGKlSGn11XseNj94gRAg9JAKDelKM5aYWnL3yFmi+Rny6CrxRrDwCeKJ8T M2gbU0lltRxqBykNI6u/gZo= =tqza -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
