Re: [TuxKart-devel] Character Animation?

[Matze B. <ma...@br...>]

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, Steve Baker wrote:

> Ingo Ruhnke wrote:
> > Does anybody have some ideas on how we should handle character
> > animation? Should we use simple frame based animation or use bones and
> > keyframes, probally by using Cal3d.
> 
> The Cal3d *runtime* also doesn't fit into the PLIB rendering framework
> at all well.  Dunno about any off-line tools they might provide though.
Are you actually sure about that? In CrystalSpace we created a cal3d 
plugin relatively easily, and they also say that their API is game-engine 
independent.

cal3d's big strength is that it has very good exporters for 3dsmax and 
blender (from what I've heard), along with LOD and a simple spring model 
for animating clothes (not sure if we really need that in tuxkart). Esp. 
the dynamic LOD would surely be useful for cal3d. And at least the cally 
demo runs very fast on my computer, so I doubt cal3d will be a speed 
problem.

> 
> PLIB can do either frame-based, key-frame-with-interpolation or true
> skin/bones with either the bones being key-framed or (in principle)
> with the bones being driven by some external physics code.
The important question here, is if we have good importers/exporters for 
that?

> 
> Doesn't Blender have an animation package?   I thought it did. But
> whatever we use, I suspect the issues will all be to do with how to
> export animations in a way that we can load them.
Yep

> 
> PLIB also has it's own bone-motion editor (called 'Exposer') which
> take bones modelled as line segments within a polygonal skin and
> lets you adjust them into different poses at points a long a time-line.
> It saves the animations in PLIB's "native" file format - which eliminates
> any issues to do with file format translation.
blender's bone editing stuff seem more powerfull to me (also it's 
integrated with blender and not an external app) Well I wouldn't expect 
much different proposals from the plib author ;-)

Greetings,
	Matze