Hello everyone.
First of all apologize if i say some stupid stuff because i'm a complete noob in this area.
I`ve just started playing with some modelling and animation tools and i have several questions that maybe someone around here can solve.
Imagine i have several bodies, heads and cloths modelled and i want to animate them. For what i've seen, the best thing to do is make an skeletal animation adding some bones to the bodies, heads and cloths, with the same names, so that the skeletal animation can be shared.
Here is where my problems start.
1) It seems that all the formats that include skeletal animation (.x, b3d etc) the skeleton and the mesh are binded inside the same file. Moreover, the skeleton and the mesh are binded (correct me if i'm wrong) at per vertex level, instead of an area or sub mesh level. So...do i have to make a copy of the skeleton and the vertex association for each file?
2) How do you establish links between the cloths and the body for example?, I’ve been thinking on several approaches, but don't know if they are right or are even possible...
- Set some king of collision detection for the cloth mesh at a vertex level and some kind of invisible area over the body so when the invisible area collies with the cloth, it moves away from the body...?
- Build the cloths with their own bones and some "shared" bones so we can associate a bone in the cloth with a bone in the body (the same exact bone) so when we build the complete mesh, the bone is not duplicated but is the same real bone in the final mesh...
- From all the animation tools i've tried, Mikoto seems to be the most computer-architectural approach, based on layers and interaction between layers, all the others are far too complex for an in game model animation. Is it possible to do something like what it does, set an intermediate layer (mikoto’s anchors) so that we can specify areas of actuation and relations between several mesh parts like cloths? I believe this is the most intuitive approach for building a skeletal animation, I mean, you just set the area actuation of a bone and you put as many objects inside as you like, set the anchors with the body if you want it to move as the body moves and everything is done…
3) What about gravity affecting some parts of the mesh-skeleton... Is there a way to say that some bones or articulations are locked to a position and some others are free to move according to gravity or other forces? For example, imagine i put some bones at the hair of a character and set some of the to be free so that part of the hair moves freely...is this the correct way to implement this feature? can something like this be done with irrlicht?
4) Is there any way to establish a link between the camera and a bone? Lets say, a bone that controls the eyes of the character so when the camera moves, the eyes follow?
5) Is there any tool to build a hierarchical mesh, so we can have several different types of eyes-faces and hide/show them inside irrlicht as it is possible with irrEdit. I've tried loading a hierarchical .X mesh and irrEdit crashed, maybe those are not supported.
Maybe some of these features are far too advanced for a noob, but i really want to do things the proper way from the start.
Thank you in advance.