Bones

[Preston]

Good morning,

because I'm new to 3d bones please bear with the following question: is there a way to feed 3d models with bones to Xith3d?
Since I've never read about it here in the forum, I guess the answer is no? In case of that: would it be a (very) big task to do such a thing?

[Yuri Vl. Gushchin]

I planned to work on this in really nearest future. The way of defining bone-animated model will be quite similar to Morph, but only bones will be morphed while the shape will be calculated basing on morphed bones.

Yuri

[abies]

Please consider making bone interface generic enough to support shape-per-bone version (as opposed to skin-mesh with weights). This way, every bone would modify transform group, not touching geometry at all. This allows geometry to be cached on GPU, use GPU transforms and is absolutely enough for robots/turrets/mechanical stuff.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Yuri Vl. Gushchin]

I expect to have several different bone-related nodes as an extension to Xith3D core nodes. The Morph node had to be also left away from Xith3D core but added because of Java3D compatibility reasons.

As for bone animations, I am thinking about weighted skin-mesh (say, Morph-based), shape-per-bone (say, GeometryTranslocator-based), Bone groups (as a tree of TransformGroups), and, more interesting, Cg or GLslang-based bone anim nodes. I don't know which will come first but what I personally need first is a skin-mesh.

Yuri

[Preston]

A graphic artist who feeds his bones-animated 3d modells to Renderware, said that Renderware does the blending of the (boned) animation models "internally" (?). So the artist who does do the animation, doesn't need to create the blending of one animation sequence to the other.

Does Xith3d's "bone" system intend to provide something similar?

I'm asking because I really don't know, but am being told that to program such a blending in a "non boned" 3d-engine is complex...

[Yuri Vl. Gushchin]

program such a blending in a "non boned" 3d-engine is complex...

Any 3D engine pretending to be good is complex. Complexity is not a stopper to implement this.

Even more, I already have two boned test models from two different animation authoring programs, so we will see very soon.

Yuri

[Preston]

Any 3D engine pretending to be good is complex. Complexity is not a stopper to implement this.

Yes, of course not. :-)
What I've meant (sorry for my basic English) has been: in case someone would have to implement this "boning" into his game using a non-boned 3d engine, it would delay his game by some months and this could be a stopper argument for the non-boned 3d engine (in case the graphic artists for example would instist on boned animations).
(I'm not sure again if I expressed it correctly in English... hope it's more clear now?)

Even more, I already have two boned test models from two different animation authoring programs, so we will see very soon.

Very good! Sounds pretty well. :-)  Can't wait again... ;-)

[Yuri Vl. Gushchin]

in case someone would have to implement this "boning" into his game using a non-boned 3d engine, it would delay his game by some months and this could be a stopper argument for the non-boned 3d engine (in case the graphic artists for example would instist on boned animations).

In short words: Xith3D will support bone animation. I hope this will be added in the nearest future.

Yuri