Skin and Bones

Spent last week working on the fun math of skin and bones animation. My job on this was to get the skin actually updating to follow the bones which may sound easy... Trust me, it isn't.

Here's a shot from about day 3 (of 7 total) - FPS is a bit low due to naive frame by frame updating of the skin:



My first implementation worked from a Bone perspective, grabbing each bone and updating the associated vertices. This was fast and worked ok, but had a few small issues. It also wasn't compatible with more future looking solutions such as doing the skin calculations on the card instead of the CPU. So, on day 7 I flipped the class structure to a Vertex perspective and I'm happy to say things are working quite well now.

Mark meanwhile worked out more Collada stuff, particularly loading the animation keyframes and putting together a controller similar to jME's joint controller to get those bones moving. The combined result looks great. :)

updates

Life is getting back to normal one piece at a time in the the Slack family. This last month was a crazy whirl-wind of activity though. We took a trip to Taiwan to see my wife's family, meet friends, and eat.... and eat. :) After getting back, we had a little over a week to prepare the house - and ourselves - for moving to another state. We then loaded all of our stuff into boxes and prepped the house for sale, afterwards immediately driving to Texas in a Passat crammed with the "essentials" (you know, like the GameCube, computers, projector... oh and a little clothing.)

The day we got to Texas (two day drive as I said in the earlier post) we began looking at homes. Then the past two weeks have been filled with various fun tasks such as re-establishing insurance, applying for home loans, getting Aaron into school and finding our way through the snarl of concrete and tar they have the nerve of calling roads here. (Sorry, I'm a bit spoiled after the streets and highways of the Phoenix valley - which are not perfect but awesome compared to LA, New York city and now Austin. :)

This past week brought even more fun when one morning Jeni had to rush to the ER because of complications with her pregnancy. It turned out to be ok, but we both did not need the extra stress.

Oh yeah, and I started work on top of all of that. Fortunately that has been the bright spot of it all. So far we have been developing support tools in preperation for a full court press on something big (you probably know from jME that I enjoy building tools and editors though.) One thing that takes getting used to is having very talented artists and modellers at our disposal. Working finally with professional content is amazing. If we are allowed to post shots later I will.

So yeah, lots of fun this past month.