# Skeletal Animation - Visualizing a Bone

## Recommended Posts

Hello everyone! For almost two months I've been trying to solve a small problem. So the situation is this, I have a hierarchy of "joints", each of them representing a local coordinate system, relative to one another (see Figure 1). Every joint has a final (global) and a relative (local) transformation matrices. The line between two joints represents a "bone" (Figure 1 - d). I need to visualize a bone using a 3-D object (for example a box (Figure 2)). The bone object needs to be positionned between the parent and child joints with correct rotation angle (Figure 3). The question is, how can I calculate the transformation matrix for the bone object with the data given? Any ideas are welcome! Thanks in advance!

##### Share on other sites
Here's something that I'm using. Granted, I don't have actual bone objects, but for each joint, I simply have a pointer to the parent and a list of children, and the bones are drawn between them.

This was given to me by a guy named "someusername." If you're out there, thanks.

void drawBone(	const util::CVector3d& p1, const util::CVector3d& p2, float radius,		const video::CColor& c = video::CColor(0.0f,0.0f,0.0f), float width=1.0f ) const{	m_boneDraw.generatePoints(p1.distanceBetween(p2), width, radius);	util::CVector3d localZ( p2 - p1 );	localZ.normalize();	// the direction from the start point to end point	// assuming that the up vector for the world is (0,1,0)	util::CVector3d localX;	localX = localZ.crossProduct( util::CVector3d(0,1,0) );	// find the local y axis	util::CVector3d localY;	localY = localX.crossProduct( localZ );	// create the matrix	// http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/viewreply.asp?ID=2391549	util::CMatrix m;	// normalize, just in case	localX.normalize();	localY.normalize();	localZ.normalize();	m(0,0) = localX.x;	m(1,0) = localY.x;	m(2,0) = localZ.x;	m(0,1) = localX.y;	m(1,1) = localY.y;	m(2,1) = localZ.y;	m(0,2) = localX.z;	m(1,2) = localY.z;	m(2,2) = localZ.z;	m(3,0) = p1.x;	m(3,1) = p1.y;	m(3,2) = p1.z;			// transform so we have the right rotation, etc	m_sceneManager->getVideoDriver()->pushMatrix();	m_sceneManager->getVideoDriver()->transform(video::WORLD_MATRIX, m);	// draw the bone	m_boneDraw.render(m_sceneManager, c);	// done with drawing bone	m_sceneManager->getVideoDriver()->popMatrix();}

It does use all my object types, but it shouldn't really be that hard to figure out.

## Create an account

Register a new account

• ### Forum Statistics

• Total Topics
627700
• Total Posts
2978690

• 20
• 14
• 12
• 10
• 12