Bones and joints

[sierracharlie]

The title says it all....

[lisa]

For animation, or for export to a game?

There's no animation with AC3D itself.

For exporting AC3D models to games or to animation programs, a number of the exporters will use the heirarchy view (F8) and object centres as basic bones and joints.

[sierracharlie]

Not for animations. I am using joints for programmatically setting camera mount positions, joining models together, docking positions, etc.

[lisa]

Are you writing your own plugins?

To get the pivots (joint centers), you'll want:
ac_object_get_centre(pObject)

To get the hierarchy, which you can use to join things together and make your own skeleton:
ac_object_get_childrenlist(pObject)
ac_object_get_num_children(pObject)

My own plugins work that way, I set the joint center using the object center, and then determine the bones by locating the parent object and building the skeleton that way. I believe X-Plane and some of the others do something similar.

[Mossie]

So how difficult would it be to make a plugin covering basic animation?

Also could the animation be included in the Collada export?

It is an ask, but you don't ask you don't get.

[lisa]

Originally Posted by Mossie

It is an ask, but you don't ask you don't get.

General animation\joint setup, not too hard at all. The poser exporter and milkshape skeleton exporter both already do exactly this.

Collada, I don't know. I've been actually wanting to write one myself, but haven't found a good manual or simple sample file yet. I'm sure its' out there, just don't have a link for it. I found a couple of different XSDs, but the XSD is a bit vague on some of the points. Some kind of "here's a list of all the possible nodes and their meanings" would be especially helpful.

[Mossie]

Yes, I seen the spec for the file here: http://www.khronos.org/files/collada_spec_1_4.pdf

But a quick look around the web didn't pop up any example files, except from http://www.collada.org/owl/, you can log in without signing on. There are some files here, but not sure how usefull.

[lisa]

Booya! Exactly what I've been looking for, thanks! Looks like I have some reading to do.

[sierracharlie]

Hi Lisa,

I create the joints programatically in the game engine I am using (Panda3d) based on a configuration string for the model. I would prefer to create some of the joints statically in AC3D.