Maia1003 wrote:BTW, do you know Cal3D for character animation ?
I've heard of it. I've seen it in some applications too.
But it is my perception that it's not really actively maintained. Last svn commit was on january 2012, but activity is very sparse.
Then again, it could be a stable system that does not need much changing (how much did low level animation systems change the last 5 to 10 years anyway?).
If it supports dual quaternion and hardware skinning I would not complain, but I don't really know what its current features are.
Ogre3d has its own animation system (both morph and skeletal) so I don't need an external one. It is however quite low level too so it does require you to implement things like animation trees yourself. On the other hand, that gives you the freedom to fit it to your own needs.
I will try to make a tutorial about exporting as soon as I find the time where I will explain all the steps.
About facial animation, I'm still not really sure how to tackle that one. Blender has this irritating limitation that you cannot edit a mesh with morph keys attached, even if the area you're editing is not affecting any of the morphs.
I guess it will come down to having a blender script that restores the shapekeys to the new mesh there where it didn't change. For example if you didn't change the face you could restore all faceshapes to it.
Come to think of it, maybe you could use the
Corrective Shape Keys blender addon for this. I submitted a bugfix for it recently because it broke with the latest blender versions, depending on whether that fix is already in newer blender builds or not you might have to fetch the latest version yourself to get it to work.