Conventions for Animation

[Pancakes]

Hello guys! Thanks to Aggror's tutorials I can actually do stuff inside the editor!~ (I still haven't gotten over the fact that I can actually use Leadwerks now )

 

Okay at this point I will begin animating characters pretty soon and before I begin rigging I'd like to know what are the rules of thumb for Leadwerks 2.31?

 

If any of you are animators or have animators on your team it would be very helpful if you could answer the following questions because the only game engine I've used animations in before was Blender Game Engine and as you know in Blender you can simply animate your model and then press the Play Game button and it works. I'm not used to importing animations across multiple file types:

 

1. I will be using IK solvers to assist me in my animation attempts. How exactly does that work in Leadwerks? Do I need to import the IK (solver) bones or just the bones with weight painting to them? In blender this is handled automatically so I could use a hint.

 

2. Also, how many bones do you recommend. My character triangle counts will be about 3-5k each. Texture res will probably be multiple 1k maps with the occasional 2k map. So how many bones before performance gets hit hard for a middle of the road performance PC?

 

That's about it for now.

 

Thanks for any help!

[Pixel Perfect]

1. I will be using IK solvers to assist me in my animation attempts. How exactly does that work in Leadwerks? Do I need to import the IK (solver) bones or just the bones with weight painting to them? In blender this is handled automatically so I could use a hint.

There is no support of IK in Leadwerks so I'd guess there would only be any point in exporting the weighted bones as your animation package should have taken care of the IK bit for you.

 

Also, how many bones do you recommend. My character triangle counts will be about 3-5k each. Texture res will probably be multiple 1k maps with the occasional 2k map. So how many bones before performance gets hit hard for a middle of the road performance PC?

Leadwerks supports up to 256 bones now and the skeletal animation is handled by the GPU on the graphics card so shouldn't effect the performance too much. I must admit I've not tried anything with more than about 90 bones myself. Your poly count sounds about right for lower end hardware.

 

Look forward to seeing some of your animated work!

[TylerH]

It was either Chris Paulson or Roland, and myself, who implemented a system in C++ for inverse kinematics for Leadwerks. The code has to be around here somewhere...

[Pancakes]

Thanks Pixel!

 

And Tyler I will do a search for that! If that's okay with you.

[TylerH]

Here it is:

 

http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?/blog/19/entry-94-ik-animation/

 

I attached the Vector3 and Quaternion classes to this post. They are from my somewhat abandoned OpenGL 3.0 engine.

synergy.zip

[Chris Paulson]

Hi,

 

I'm still working away on this sort of stuff in the background. I've not posted anything about it because I've not made lots of progress until recently.

 

I'm hoping if I succeed to put a video together on this in about a months time and I'll release all my code.

 

There should be some nice blended animation and foot placement stuff in it. I've done the blend trees I just need to incorporate it into my overall game system then do the IK foot placement.

 

I've got a blend system that will blend and play:-

 

idle, walk/run, walk left/right, crouch walk/run, crouch left/right all at the same time depending on speed/angle/crouch factor.

[Chris Paulson]

Forgot to point out, unless you're a programmer doing anything with inverse IK is going to be out of your reach, but you don't need it if your just using standard LE animation.