Anim8or Community

General Category => General Anim8or Forum => Topic started by: DFX2KX on September 27, 2015, 12:14:11 pm

Title: Questions regarding anim80r's skinning animations
Post by: DFX2KX on September 27, 2015, 12:14:11 pm
Okay, I've used anim80r for a number of years  (since before .98), and I can use skinned animations fine, be they manually applied, or using the default weighting mechanism. However, I'm curious if any of you know how the actual x,y, and z of the vertexes are calculated. I'm trying to implement some scripts for Game Maker Studio that'll let GM: S read and render AN8 files natively. It seems MUCH easier to do then implementing 3DS files, at least.

I know the bone positions are stored in Quarternion form, and I've got scripts for that, as well as for transforming a single vertex based on that. But I'm not entirely sure how to make the vertexes move only partially based on weight. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot written about it in the file's reference.

Any insight would be most appreciated!
Title: Re: Questions regarding anim80r's skinning animations
Post by: Steve on September 28, 2015, 12:59:59 pm
Are you using painted weights or bone influences? Weights are easier to describe since they are just the weighted average of the transformed positions of the different bones. For influences you first need to compute weights from the influence parameters and then use those weights in the same manner as painted weights.

I'll send you more details when I get back home in a week or so. Right now I'm in Germany trying to avoid Oktoberfest, and it's a bit difficult to write much on my phone.
Title: Re: Questions regarding anim80r's skinning animations
Post by: DFX2KX on October 02, 2015, 03:52:21 am
Answered by the man himself!  :o

I'm aiming to support painted weights mainly, but if bone influence can also be supported, it'd be worth the extra work, as bone influence is much less tedious, and seems to be what most folks do. I'd like to make it as easy to use from an end user standpoint as I can.  A bit of coding now, saving me a lot of extra work in asset creation later is a reasonable trade-off.

That country has to be crazy right now, I do not envy you sir. I haven't really had a chance to mess with it too much, so there's no rush. Anim8or's file-type is nice, in that I'm not having to divine an understanding of a cryptic binary file. That makes it particularly handy.