Quote:Original post by MeshMan
I'm wondering how you put this all into a OOP kind of system? I've never fully understood how the render path looks. Like say you have a "class MeshNode" which essentialy is your mesh which contains - its local transform? If I also store a list of attatched MeshNode's, does it go something like:

I just use a tree list. The root node is at the top, and each node sends it's final result down to all of it's children.

If you're referring to weapons, I don't have them as part of the skeleton. Each weapon controls itself, rather than be part of the hierarchy. Characters would just have a simple list of attached objects. Scroll through the list to update and/or render, and let each object take care of itself. All the object really needs is a link to the bone matrix that it's attached to.

Quote:I think I get the clothing thing and now I think my lack of experience with bone animations might be the problem. Originally I thought it might be like 2d, where you had to animate every article of clothing. But with bone animations. All you need is a single skeleton that has all the motions. And then have the envelopes setup nicely so that no matter what mesh legs you use, or what mesh torso, or arms, they will always fit on the bones, inside the envelopes and animate nicely.

Skeletons are very important. If it's possible to use the same skeleton for all of the humanoid models in your game, go for it. I couldn't get away with it; my women looked like freaks with male shoulders. So I have gender specific skeletons. That means I can recycle animations between any gender-matching characters. Remember that you can scale models, so it's not very hard to make an ogre using the same skeleton you use to make an elf, with a bit of tweaking. Providing accurate melee-type contact between different scaled characters may bite you, though.

Quote:I have played with envelopes and animating bones in 3d Max. I didn't know that you could load a skeleton and then swap different meshes into the envelopes though. As I said this may have to do with my inexperience with skeletal models, but maybe you could give me some pseudo pointers as to how that's done?

The envolopes do not need to be exactly the same. I fitted a really thick hooded coat (like Jin's coat in Tekken 4) to a guy, and the coat's envolopes were huge. What I did was import the character mesh into the coat scene and gave it the same animations. As the time slider is moved around, they both animate together, and envolope/bending problems become obvious. So it's only the skeleton that is a must. You could start from scratch with new envolopes for each model, as long as you have a method to see the results.

Quote:Also, does anyone know where I could find a .x or a .max or .md3 that has bones and animations in it? Not up to paying for a model just for learning this technique.

There was a model, tiny.x, that comes with the Direct SDK. I think it still does.

Quote:I have Max, if worse comes to worse I can run though a tutorial to make my own. However I can never get the knee to tween right where the envelopes overlap, but that's clearly off topic. =)

I feel ya. I've been through it so many times, the pain is starting to subside, though. I personally hate the hip area more than the knees.

Quote:Original post by GeekPlusPlus
When it comes to loading the skeleton itself. Would that be in it's own .x? And then you would load the clothing meshes separately?

It just depends on how you prefer to do it. In my engine, I created an object called a "Race", which is basically just a skeleton class, with extra details like distance values and heights. Humanoid males have a race, and humanoid females use a different race. The race file is created externally using a small tool I made. It basically just rips the skeletal information (not animation, but bone offsets, hierarchy order and such) out of an x-file skinmesh and stores it by itself. All skin meshes from that point on are implimented as "suits". Characters equip suits to build their body just like they equip clothing or armor. All suits have a race type, and all compatible suits are of the same race.

There is never a reason to "attach" the skeleton to a mesh. The skeleton is only needed to animate. So the character object in your game would animate his skeleton, then pass the final array of animated bone matrices to all of his meshes. That array of matrices is all that's needed to render your skinmesh.

This is how I currently accomplish this. But it wasn't an easy task getting this far. I don't recommend diving in head first. You should probably try to experiment with a single animated mesh, at least until you get a good grasp of how it works.

Quote:lastly, you would have the torso and legs as separate meshes so you can change clothes, and the head separate for custom faces, and the arms separate so you can chop them off, then you would have tweening issues at those joints right? Unless you made the mesh continue past the joint for the arm and then had the break not at a joint. Did I just answer my own question?

Again, I made another tool. The tool loads in an x-file and allows me to select subsets to export as individual meshes. There are no tweening issues because all of the seem vertices have the exact same bone weights. You can see a snap of one of my characters here (don't poke fune, he's WIP [smile]). He's made up of about 16 seperate meshes, and there are never visible seams or cracks as he animates.

Quote:So if you wanted to have changeable pants and allow both legs to be lopped off. You would have to build the legs, each as a separate mesh, build the hip area up to the top of the pants as a separate mesh. Then load all 3 when changing pants and apply them to the skeleton. I think that sounds right.

Yes you could do it that way. But you might want to consider using subsets to seperate parts rather than seperate meshes.

Quote:Lastly, do you have problems finding skeletal animations that will load properly other than tiny.x. I have heard it's near impossible.

I use the exporter from www.Quest3D.com with a slightly old version of 3D Studio. Once again, I made a tool which extracts the animation from an x-file and stores it seperately. But I've never had any problems reading the exported files.