Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Welcome to New Beginnings. We hope you enjoy your visit.


You're currently viewing our website and forum as a guest. You can currently only read posts and are subject to ads. Join for free and you can have full access + have an ad free experience.


Join our community!


If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
Update 4/13/13
Topic Started: Apr 13 2013, 05:23 PM (154 Views)
Lucas
Member Avatar
Chief Programmer

Evening everyone :)

Welp, I finally overcame the major roadblocks of animation! See below:


Granted, this is an incredibly simple animation. All it is basically is just a rectangle following a triangular path. However, in order to get this working, two major obstacles had to be overcome. (1) Frames and keyframes had to be synced in order to make the animation play out correctly. This was a bit of a mathematical challenge, but it works quite well now. While messing with the frames, I also made animation frame-rate independent of game frame-rate, so that no matter what FPS you are getting, animations play at the same speed of 24 frames per second. (2) Interpolation between keyframes and their required data was needed. Yes, it would have been easier to load in all of the animation data frame by frame, but that would take a bunch of memory. i.e., this simple animation takes 4 keyframes of data, while importing the whole animation would have taken 50 frames of data. Big difference. This whole interpolation thingie really wasn't too hard, I just had to sit down and thing about it for a bit. The solution actually arose in a blog post I was writing here.

Now that a simple animation system is up and running with skeletal data, its time to move on to the two other obstacles I have run into. (1) Bones (armatures) in blender are "parented" to one another, but this information is not exported in DirectX files the way I thought it was, so having an animation with more than one bone is currently impossible until I figure out how to alter the exporter to the game's needs or alter the loader to compensate for the default exporter's configurations. (2) Bones can have two types of motions, translations and rotations. Currently, only translations are supported. The rotation data is successfully loaded into the game, but I've forgotten the math behind how it works :P A little brushing up on my trig after finals will easily remove this roadblock and allow bones to rotate, twist, and twirl.

Anyhow, that is all for this weeks update ;) Stay tuned!
View the progress of the game here!
RockSplitStudios.com
My Blog
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Rozn
Member Avatar


Omg a video :O
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
« Previous Topic · Announcements · Next Topic »
Add Reply