Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news1.scei.co.jp!scea!greg_labrec@interactive.sony.com From: Nick Porcino Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.programming.3d_graphics Subject: Single mesh model problem Date: Wed, 27 Aug 1997 22:07:25 -0800 Organization: SCEA News Server Lines: 34 Message-ID: <3405159B.6D6@bc.sympatico.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: vcta01m03-148.bctel.ca Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-2022-jp Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01-C-SYMPA (Macintosh; I; PPC) Hi! I'm looking for a hint on how to get started - I'm working on an character animation system and I want to have single mesh objects. ie - a human would be represented by a single mesh, not a hierarchy of parts (Tobal 2, vs. Tobal #1, what a difference!) I've found a really cool cheap modeler (Martin Hash 3D www.hash.com) that outputs its files in a game ready format (although I have to run the models through a filter to convert floats to ints). My problem is that my bone system connects individual bones to groups of verts, and I can't think of any way to leverage the Yaroze libraries to let me do this. The only things I've come up with are: 1) break the model up into parts as individual TMDs, use the libraries to transform the parts according to the bone matrices, then somehow figure out where the library puts the transformed verts and suck that data out and jam it into my single mesh TMD which then gets transformed to world and screen. Seems highly non-optimal. 2) transform my points a vert at a time using the Matrix functions in the library then twiddle the verts in my model accordingly. Unless there's a batch multiply that I missed, this too seems highly unoptimal. 3) trick out the libraries so they think the vert groups are actually different objects. This would be optimal, but I can't think of any way to do it. Maybe a bunch of dummy objects pointing into different parts of the real object's vert array? 4) Give up. But I don't intend to. Any help or suggestions would be hugely appreciated. - nick porcino