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).
Sorry, I have to call foul on some of this.
Any animation you see in any Unreal Tournament 2004 (except for the
flags in CTF, I think, and anything that just moves textures around,
which is how moving tree leaves works most of the time) has a skeleton
behind it. The same skeletal system that drives characters drives the
vehicles; the physics system is competely separate. You can use physics
to trigger your e.g. tire rotation animations, but it's not necessary.
Animations can be blended or played back at any point along the
hierarchy, so one animation that drives one wheel can be played back
independently of anything else going on in the car.
Google for "svehicle" and you'll get docs like these on how it works:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/SVehicleCreation
If you poke around a little more, you'll see my name signed to some of
those. I don't know of any reason why Cal3D wouldn't be able to handle
programmatically animating a vehicle other than the fact that no-one's
tried it; skeletal systems aren't a cakewalk, but it's not brain surgery
either. Don't rule it out just because it's not trivial.
Thanks,
Vitorio Miliano
