New Animation System for Irrlicht

[sudi]

I think u should do it like the following.
the system should take into account if there is a keyframe for a bone or not.
so it is up to the animator if there should be spereated animations or not.
therefor an unlimeted ammount of animations playing at the same time.

[sio2]

Keep in mind that almost every non-trivial game is cpu limited - and Irrlicht currently currently has much scope for offloading graphics work to the gpu.

[vermeer]

I guess this is what people mean by "melting" (a term I've never heard of in this context).

It's as am an artist, plently ignorant of coding matters, and also as english is not my first language...I only hardly manage with it...

but yep, it's usually said as blending...I became creative (as an artist) 'cause in that case I was meaning not only the usual use of it: you play an animation, and a blend by code is applied by the engine, with the next animation...i was meaning, besides that functionality, that an animation could be happening all the time while a main animation is playing. I think this has some relation with animation stuff like secondary animation, can have that application, but mainly, is as would be really more rich for the games. Because the possibilities are endless. Imagine: artist makes the anim of a warrior swinging the word in the air...engine could -er...melt?- the animation with running animation. As well could do with stand still, or jump. kills a load of time of the artist, and an amazing size in memory. I've done full sets doing the melts/blends my self, but is not only avoid work to the artist, is the possibilities it has.

In facial animation, adds richness. you can have smile anim, sad mouth, and angry, and happy browses anims. Combining anims you have a lot more. Dividing it more, you can have separate smaller control areas (right side of mouth, left side, one per browse, etc) Allowing really complex facial anims. Subdivide, and you have all control wished, if you *really* want that amount of work for artist and coder..I myself just prefer do the anims needed and throw it done to the coder.

such as "reload", which can then be used no matter what the lower body is doing (and vice versa).

yes, sorry, you have already mentioned...

If there's not a limit in layers , nice...

I know ppl with custom engines have done channels per chain of bones, even, controlling em by script language,(for ease of use mainly) later on.

slowly opens the thing to ragdolls, control area of impact, and so trigger a subanimation, even while another anim (ie: falling) is happening...etc...

All that for a future.

[Halifax]

Ahh ok I have the concept of blending now. Thanks

[noone88]

mhhh... will this blending works with milkshape files? I hope so!!!

I put a file together in milkshape which has 4500Frames... I don't have to tell you that this slows down the engine alot.

[Luke]

I think u should do it like the following.
the system should take into account if there is a keyframe for a bone or not.
so it is up to the animator if there should be spereated animations or not.
therefor an unlimeted ammount of animations playing at the same time.

I may use have a few different option for blending, one option maybe blending the animation based on the static pose.

But because there is bone control, you can write your own method of blending.

mhhh... will this blending works with milkshape files? I hope so!!!

Yeah, with the new animation system all formats will be using the same animation code.

I put a file together in milkshape which has 4500Frames... I don't have to tell you that this slows down the engine alot.

Yeah, with the system now the keyframes are searched though every frame, which will be slow if you have a lot of frames in your mesh.

With the new animation system, once the keyframe has been found it’s index is stored (per node) and will be used to stop then need to search though all keyframes again, in most cases.

[sio2]

mhhh... will this blending works with milkshape files? I hope so!!!

I put a file together in milkshape which has 4500Frames... I don't have to tell you that this slows down the engine alot.

I use b3d for everything. Luke improved the performance of B3D months ago before he started on the new skinmesh stuff.

I don't know if it's improved lately but I found loading ms3d files painfully slow. I now use UltimateUnwrap3D to convert to Blitz3D format - fast to load and much faster to render.

[vermeer]

yup, certainly b3d better than ms3d...

[Dorth]

Last message nearly a month ago, can we have an update Luke?
When will this improved mesh animation system be at our doorstep? (nah, no need for dates, just an update report would be quite nice )

[hybrid]

Now with Luke having SVN access chances are good that we see some progress in the near future already in Irrlicht directly.

[bitplane]

the new B3D loader and CSkinnedMesh stuff is now in SVN under /branches/SkinnedMesh for your testing pleasure
The more people testing, submitting feedback bugs and fixes - the sooner this will be merged back into the main branch. Knock yourself out guys!

[buhatkj]

OK, I've got it, compiled it, and successfully loaded up b3d/md2 models with it, what are some new features that I should test?
On the level of the node, most of the animation related stuff looks the same, I don't know what to do from here. The updateAnimation bit isnt done yet i guess? In any case, It compiles nicely and runs the basic hello world example without any changes pretty much.

[Luke]

what are some new features that I should test?

well I've made the frame number in animatedscenenode a float instead of an int, so the annoying *100, *8, etc hacks for smooth animations isn't needed anymore, so there should be less confused users.

I've just got joint control working, but only just, it's not really tested, and some of the code is only temporary.
Right now it's creating joints regardless of if your using joint control and transitions, I'll change that later.
Change an if statement in the render function of CAnimatedSceneNode to use it.

The updateAnimation bit isnt done yet i guess?

yeah, I've just added it now, and I've changed it's name to animateJoints() because that's what it does. The transitions part in animateJoints isn't yet done but.

[vermeer]

I wanna test the b3d loader part...

let me see if I am able to find it in that svn thing...last time I got lost, lol... (lack of experience handling those thingz...)

[vermeer]

oh, loader, not blender exporter.

sorry, got messed