Facial animation

[brick]

Does anyone have any suggestions about making facial animations in Irrlicht? Are there perhaps some libraries that I could use to create realistic characters with the engine? I'm only just getting the hang of Irrlicht, so maybe the task is too difficult?

[Radikalizm]

Facial animation can be done with some traditional animation methods which are perfectly supported by irrlicht
Look into some animation tools to find out how to create facial animations, if you use a supported animation format you just have to load your mesh like a regular animated mesh

[brick]

Thanks, will try that.

[brick]

Are there any particular animation tools that you would suggest I use, that are easy to master and use?

[shadowslair]

I don`t think you can get very good facial animation easily. I think Radikalizm talks about using some skinned mesh with bones assigned to the face vertices to move them. You can also use some of the morph animation formats Irrlicht supports for the head only, but it all depends on the kind of animation and rig you need as there are tons of styles for different purposes. But luckily, for a game, it`s ok to compromise quality.
For tools the most used are Blender (free) and 3ds Max (paid). There are many alternatives each one with its own cons and pros, but the tool isn`t that important, but the chimpmunk standing in front of the screen and its head content... I can say each tool is easy to get used, but as people are different it depends. Just keep in mind that the "mastering" comes after you`ve been taught or after some hard self taught process and were practising it for at least 2 years (if you`re talented). I know some guys who have graduated animation (both classic and modern), some of them were animating for years and still there`re not very good at it.
As many things like programming, modelling and on the only way to figure out how deep the animation knowledge sea is, is to practise 24/7. The more you learn, the more you`ll find out that your knowledge is just a microbe on elephant sh!t. Sorry for the offtopic, but I felt I needed to make it clear that the "mastering" process longs as long as you`re over the ground, not sth you can get for a month or two.

[nespa]

search for morph animation

[brick]

Many thanks for the answers.

[brick]

Another (possibly silly) question: I was planning on perhaps creating an animation in 3ds max and exporting it to Irrlicht. However, it says here: http://www.irrlicht3d.org/wiki/index.ph ... ggedmeshes
that Irrlicht supports STATIC 3ds meshes. I guess that means that I'd first have to convert it to one of the 3 supported animated formats?

[shadowslair]

If you want to set the keyframes inside Max and load and use the format of your choice, then yes, you need to export (you meant that with "convert", right?) them from max to one of the animated formats, for the simple reason .obj doesnt support animation, .3ds - we can say it`s static too etc.

[brick]

Cool, I see now that there are 3ds max plugins for exporting in .x format.

[brick]

Does anyone know what can cause a part of the object to not be visible? I imported a simple .X object (a box) into Irrlicht and attached a texture to it. When I run it, Visual Studio doesn't load the faces of the box that are turned directly to the camera. If I rotate around the object, again it doesn't show the faces turned to me, but only the insides of the other faces. Also it seems to be attaching the texture to the inside of the object?

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/82 ... xture.jpg/

I don't know if this is a common problem. If this isn't precise enough, I'll add the code. Thank you in advance.

[CuteAlien]

When your camera is too close to polygons then those polygons are clipped. That's called the near clipping plane. You can set it's distance in the camera with setNearValue. Or just don't allow getting your camera so close.

[brick]

I know what you mean, but the faces aren't visible even when I'm viewing the object from afar.

[mongoose7]

Your normals are wrong or not specified. If you don't specify normals, the renderer uses the winding to determine which triangles are front-facing. Try specifying double-sided polygons.

Code: Select all

node->setMaterialFlag(irr::video::EMF_BACK_FACE_CULLING, false);

[brick]

That did the job. Many thanks!