I have some hard animation requirements for a remake im working on. I don't mind to wait until someone implements this stuff if Irrlicht can't do it so lets get on with the requirements.
The creatures tha need to be animated are these:
http://institute.no.sapo.pt/dfmonst.png
I haven't choose the bone and skeleton structure but this will be a standard convention for the remake. Bones that are similar in different skeletons have the same names to show they are compatible. Vertex groups have the same name as the bones they are assigned in order to link the mesh to the bones.
For example the crab-man shares the upper body part (except for the hands) with the humanoid model so in principle we can add an armor piece to the crab-man that is also compatible with the human model, but we can't add boots armor to the crab-man because he doen't have feet bones.
From the picture above the skeletons needed are:
base_human_skel - all deadra, all woodland creatures, all orc modles, all undead, all wizard monsters excpet the gargoile (22 creatures)
Bone names: foot_L, foot_R, lleg_L, lleg_R, uleg_L, uleg_R, spine1, spine2, spine3, shoulder_L, shoulder_R, uarm_L, uarm_R, larm_L, larm_R, neck, head
The following extends the humanoid model with wings.
base_human_winged_skel - daedra seducer transformation, gargoile, imp (3)
Wing bones: wing1_L, wing2_L, wing3_L, wing1_R, wing2_R, wing3_R
The centaur shares the upper body of a human with that of an hores (quadruped).
centaur_skel (1)
The crab model only shares the humanoid upper body. The rest is unique.
crab_man_skel (1)
The lamia is a combination of snake and upper body humanoid.
lamia_skel (1)
The carnivore fish is uses a snake skeleton.
snake_skel (1)
The quadruped.
quadruped_skel - horse, rat, bear, tigger, wolf (5)
A flying creature.
flyer_skel - harpy, bat, dragonling (3)
A ghost shares the upper body of a humanoid.
ghost_skel - humanoid without legs (2)
A man-beast is like a humanoid with quadruped back legs.
man_beast_skel - morrowind beast legs and human upper body (1)
Unique skeleton.
arachnid_skel - 1 creature
Unique skeleton.
scorpion _skel - 1 creature
Using .x format we can have all this but i find it to be a bit tricky and cumbersome. The ideal would be if we could separate the skeleton data from the meshes and save it (or import/export them with Blender) using a common motion capture format like .bvh or .amc.
There are some very cool motion capture resources on the net free to grab.
Free motion data:
http://www.bvhfiles.com/
http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/
Viewer:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses ... hatIs.html
The bvh importer for Blender (hopefully the exporter will come soon):
https://projects.blender.org/viewcvs/vi ... er#dirlist
