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Skin & Morph

Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 3:05 pm
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.

K

Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 3:48 pm
by kattle87
what is collada pipeline briefly?
And what do you exactly intend with skinning?

Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 5:19 pm
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