Skin & Morph

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Kjell
Posts: 1876
Joined: Sat Feb 23, 2008 11:15 pm

Skin & Morph

Post by Kjell »

8)

These are both long shots, but CPU based components that enable Skin & Morph ( Collada pipeline? ) would be a great addition. Personally I think GPU powered skinning is too costly for the average system out there ( especially when combined with shaders ), so going with a CPU approach to bridge the remaining years towards 2012 would be great.

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kattle87
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Location: Italy

Post by kattle87 »

what is collada pipeline briefly?
And what do you exactly intend with skinning?
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Kjell
Posts: 1876
Joined: Sat Feb 23, 2008 11:15 pm

Post by Kjell »

Hi Francesco,

Skin ( or Envelopes ) is a technique to animate objects by bone influence. Technically this means that each vertex of a object contains a list of bone objects it draws influence from ( in percentages, totaling 100% per vertex ). Prior to this 3D games almost always used separate body parts linked together by hierarchy ( 32-bit era ). Good examples of this approach can be seen in games like Mario 64 and Tomb Raider. Morph is a technique to animate objects by keyframe data on vertex level. This is often used for facial expressions / muscle toning etc. Both techniques have been standardized by the industry and are supported by most file formats these days. COLLADA is one of those ( open-standard & XML based ) formats.

More information on COLLADA

Regards,
Kjell
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