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.
My osgCal reincarnation have support for normal/bump mapping. But I've
done all in one shader with many #defines. There will be needed
something more scalable to support all these things.
- - 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)
BTW, cal3d have some morphing related classes. Do they work? And if
yes, are there exporters that support morphs.
- - 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 :(
Hmm. Too many things to do. And I also think that cal3d needs to be
redesigned for this. When there are GPUs, multi cores, some other
approach needed for making this all possible.
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