On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 02:31 +0200, Jan Ciger wrote: > Unreal has a specialized engine for that, they do not use the same code > as for characters. Again Cal3D will not be good for this. I also suspect > that they are using bones in Maya and Max with cars only as a way how to > connect the pieces of the car together and not really for > animation/rendering purposes - did you notice the star-like hierachy of > the bones in the car? That is nonsense from the animation point of view > (unless you are modelling an octopus) and it is obviosly only used by > the exporter to parent the pieces together. The proper animation is > normally achieved by joints in the physics engine (e.g. the physics in > Soya is done using ODE and ODE joints).
Yeah, you are right. I watched through several of the video tutorials that came with Unreal Tournament 2004 and watched how they create vehicles. They use the joints more than the bones themselves, and they used them for several purposes: * Marking attachment points for the suspension struts in the physics engine * Marking points where other meshes (like guns) are attached to the vehicle. * The animation for steering. During skinning, each wheel got attached to one of the joints so that when the joint rotated for steering, the wheels also rotate. * The motion of a gun turret. The yaw & pitch were set up using a simple skeleton in the gun turret. These all seem to fall outside the realm of Cal3d, like you originally said. However, using joints for these tasks leads to a really slick artist workflow. Is there a way to accomplish something similar in Soya? Would it require a new blender exporter that exports the skeleton along with the mesh?
