Hi, I''m looking for some help (tutorial, examples, etc.) in building an animation system for meshes. I ''simply'' want to move and rotate submeshes according to their relative zero-point. But the movement is not the tricky part - I''m looking for a way to describe and abstract the movement while the time moves on. For example a person is walking an moving his arm for and back - how far the arm moves, how fast it moves, how it switches is direction movment. Anyone an idea how I can achieve this behavior? thanks alot

Have you looked into skeletal animation (i.e. bone animation or armature animation)? One tutorial with source code that I found is here. I think it's also mentioned in most advanced game programming books (try Game Programming Gems). Basically, you assign each vertex to a "bone", then keep track of the rotation of each bone from its rest position at each keyframe of the animation using a matrix or (more likely) a quaternion. Then transform all vertices attached to that bone by the appropriate transformation, interpolating between keyframes. That's the most basic level - you can do things like make some bones parents of others so that they move all their children with them, make a vertex be affected by several different bones, and more.

[edited by - Matei on May 26, 2004 6:10:50 PM]