Pose engine lib: Suggestion for games

[sonerd]

I don't know if this suggestion is feasible at this time, but I believe it would be a great idea to distribute some parts of the pose engine as a library, with perhaps the LGPL license. The game would manage the skeleton and its animation, but the library would deform the mesh accordingly to the skeleton pose passed by the game. If the library was LGPL, it would keep your copyright but would allow use by non-opensource games (with dynamic linking only).

[pistacja]

I'm probably wrong but still...

You could export a series of posed characters from MH into your modelling program and combine these separate meshes into one animation using something like morphing. I think this is usually used to make facial animations or lip sync... but why not a whole character? If one is not using any complex game physics to simulate body reactions to outside forces at runtime (Havoc, Rug Doll, ODE etc.) then I don't think one even need bones and stuff like that... some premade animations and a bit of animation blending should do the trick.

If I'm wrong,I wouldn't mind someone telling me why, and pointing me in the right direction.

[scottgcau]

I'm no expert but I think that morphing usually works by calculating the difference between the position of a point in one target and the same point in another target and then just moves it by a percentage of this difference. Basically it moves the point in a straight line in the direction of the second target point. This means that you can't mimic the effect of a point rotating around a joint without using a lot of targets (the movement would just be broken into a bunch of much smaller straight lines that conform much better to a curve ).

[Manuel]

I'm probably wrong but still...

You could export a series of posed characters from MH into your modelling program and combine these separate meshes into one animation using something like morphing. I think this is usually used to make facial animations or lip sync... but why not a whole character? If one is not using any complex game physics to simulate body reactions to outside forces at runtime (Havoc, Rug Doll, ODE etc.) then I don't think one even need bones and stuff like that... some premade animations and a bit of animation blending should do the trick.

If I'm wrong,I wouldn't mind someone telling me why, and pointing me in the right direction.

Yes, this is one of most ancient technique used in games. I remember it for sure used in quake 2. The technical name is vertex animation, in opposition of skeletal animation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morph_target_animation