hey everyone, i just finished reading zen of direct3d by peter walsh. at the end of the book he shows how to load a mesh( .x file actualy) and make it spin. ok now here''s my question, how do you do to animate a human figure; like say make him walk. when i relooked in the book i found no answer. how do you do it??? also i would want to know how to do a random map with like trees, snow, rocks and everything else. thanks

1) In order to get a walk animation, you have to load the positions(key frames) onto lists of vertexes and then cycle through them. There''s ways to get the in-between positions by interpolating between two sets of vertexes. A deeper method is to have another set of vertexes act as a guide to movement. Bones at the centre of your 3D figure would be moved quite rapidly with limits to how they can distort and then the outer mesh that''s attached to a particular bone would be recalculated.

2) The 1st step is to load the rocks etc. into the editor of your engine. Next is decide on the frequency of their dispersal and literally drop them from the sky with collision detection on. Then save their co-ordinates to the hard-drive hehe Trees might be a bit more difficult.

ZoomBoy
Developing a iso-tile 2D RPG with skills, weapons, and adventure. See my old Hex-Tile RPG GAME, character editor, diary, 3D Art resources at Check out my web-site

thanx alot