Im beginning to use bones and T&L in both open gl and dx and I just had an idea. if you can use the T&L caps of a card to transform a number of vertices depending a matrix, why cant you use that matrix as a bone? yeah look, instead of precalculating the vectors or whatever for the bone system , why dont you pass only some vertices to the T&L pipeline using a bone rotation matrix then the next next vertices by their corresponding bone until you are done with them all.. Is this possible? I mean this could have been a total waste of time in the past but this days whit faster processors and T&L can this be done? Benefits: really easy to handle bones with realtime rotation translation and scaling modifiable at realtime, plus the ability to have more bones per model. How do you do this in open gl or DX is it possible? Edited by - Azrael on 10/3/00 6:06:20 PM

Don´t know if I understand what you are saying but...

One vertex can be modified by more then one bone, but if the vertex is only modified by one bone it would work

Hi,

First of all, bones are implemented by the software, there''s no way of implementing bones in hardware.

Bones are just vector linked together in a hiearchical tree to build a Squeleton. So, it''s sure that you can use T&L to do the transformation of those bones vectors by the transformations matrix.

To make it work, you must now define which vertices of your mesh (object) will be displaced by the movement of the bones, the displacement must be weigthted (ie : maybe bones 2, and 3 affect the displacement of vertice 8, but bone 2 only by 25%, bone 3 by 75%).

Or you must have a mesh by bones... (ie: torso -> upper-arm -> lower-arm -> hand)... I will suggest you the first one, if, first, you can understand what i mean, and you''re able to do it !!

Good Luck !!!

LowRad