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Skeletal Animation Example(s)

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David Faught

Skeletal Animation Example(s)

There is a page started on the Croquet Consortium wiki at
http://croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Skeletal_Animation_Example
for this project. Here are a few further thoughts that may find their
way onto that page eventually:

* I am thinking of first blasting through a simple figure just to get
something to work. I'm sure even this will take me several hours of
which I have few right now. We'll see how this works out.

* There is a ninja figure included with the Ogre SDK that has several
animations already built, but it may not be directly usable because it
is stored in Ogre's binary formats rather than the XML formats. I
noticed that there is an XML-to-binary conversion program available at
the Ogre site, but I'm not sure it goes both directions. While this
figure could not be freely distributed under the Croquet license, it
might be useful as an early test case for the UI portion of this
project.

* It might be cool to rig the Croquet White Rabbit and/or Alice just
to continue using the same models. I think they can be directly
imported into Blender3D for a starting point, although I haven't tried
that yet.

* I think that the real challenge is to get some real artists involved
somehow. I took enough art classes in college to know that I'm a
technician with no real artistic talent. Maybe it would be useful to
approach the Blender3D community with a contest where all entries must
be made available under the Croquet license. I have the impression
that good 3D artists are in demand and don't like to give away their
work, so this might not yield much. Maybe some students taking a
class on 3D design would be a good source?

Let me know your thoughts on any or all of this.

Dave

Peter Moore-5

Re: Skeletal Animation Example(s)

Thank you very much David for getting this started.

I think the ninja figure would be a great test if we could either
convert the binary file to XML or write a parser for the binary
format. Obviously the latter would take more work but I've found that
parsing the XML is really really slow (especially with lots of
animations). It would be really nice to have both options assuming
that we continue to use the Ogre mesh format going forward. This
would be a great opportunity for someone to contribute some code. Any
volunteers?

-Peter

On Sep 5, 2007, at 1:16 PM, David Faught wrote:

> There is a page started on the Croquet Consortium wiki at
> http://croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Skeletal_Animation_Example
> for this project. Here are a few further thoughts that may find their
> way onto that page eventually:
>
> * I am thinking of first blasting through a simple figure just to get
> something to work. I'm sure even this will take me several hours of
> which I have few right now. We'll see how this works out.
>
> * There is a ninja figure included with the Ogre SDK that has several
> animations already built, but it may not be directly usable because it
> is stored in Ogre's binary formats rather than the XML formats. I
> noticed that there is an XML-to-binary conversion program available at
> the Ogre site, but I'm not sure it goes both directions. While this
> figure could not be freely distributed under the Croquet license, it
> might be useful as an early test case for the UI portion of this
> project.
>
> * It might be cool to rig the Croquet White Rabbit and/or Alice just
> to continue using the same models. I think they can be directly
> imported into Blender3D for a starting point, although I haven't tried
> that yet.
>
> * I think that the real challenge is to get some real artists involved
> somehow. I took enough art classes in college to know that I'm a
> technician with no real artistic talent. Maybe it would be useful to
> approach the Blender3D community with a contest where all entries must
> be made available under the Croquet license. I have the impression
> that good 3D artists are in demand and don't like to give away their
> work, so this might not yield much. Maybe some students taking a
> class on 3D design would be a good source?
>
> Let me know your thoughts on any or all of this.
>
> Dave