Aardvajk

I'm writing a 3D modeller at the moment so am trying to find a way to support as many joints as possible in a model since I can't just restrict to a domain-specific sensible number like you could in a game.

 

This is DirectX 9.0 by the way, should probably stress that.

 

The only way I've ever known how to get this data into a shader is an array of matrices as a global in the shader that is written to prior to the render. However, seems (obviously) there is a fairly strict limit on how much you can allocate for global data in a shader and I also don't know if this will vary from hardware to hardware so hard to know what I can rely upon here. On my laptop I can't get more than about 40 matrices in an array before it bombs out.

 

Just wondering what other approaches people are aware of to get this matrix data into the shader. I know I can reduce things by just inputting a quaternion and a translation vector, but that is still going to take half as many (registers?) as a matrix so will still have a hard limit.

 

I'm toying with the idea of using a floating point texture to store a list of pairs of quaternion and translation vectors, using 8 texels per joint, but just wanted to see if there were more obvious solutions I'm missing? I'd rather avoid software processing of the model for animation since I can't predict the model size/complexity so need it as performant as possible.

 

Thanks in advance.

Very minor detail but just wanted to report, if someone votes up my journal, it appears as a blank item in the list when I click my rating and the funky green box that appears to inform me of an up-rate is also blank.

It's not a problem, just wanted to let you guys know. Apart from this, the whole system is working a treat and the My Content is light years ahead of what we used to have on the old site, so thanks to everyone.