Morph vs Skeleton

Wells

Was hoping someone could help answer a question or two. I've a job making some semi-cartoony characters (pimped a few in the What are you working on... thread) and its come time to animate them. Besides the problems inherent in rigging (or maybe just inherent in my ability) there are a couple of instances when useing the morpher modifier in max really helps.

i've got a frog-like character who's belly needs to puff way out before he spits. i've gotten it to work perfectly with the morpher. so what i'm basically asking is, is that a legitimate way to animate 2000 poly characters? Will most engines support this? I've asked the boss, of course, but he's yet to get back to me on it, though he's quite happy with the results.

It takes a bit longer and a bit more effort, but i really like the vertice-level control.

any light shed on the subject would be much appreciated

FatAssasin

Many game engines don't support vertex-level animation because it's more expensive that bone-level animation. So that's something you really need to find out before going further and possibly wasting time doing something your engine won't support.

If it does then you're okay, but if it doesn't there are still ways to rig his stomach so that he can do what you need. Find out if the engine supports bone scaling as well as rotation. If it does then you can weight the belly verts to a dummy box and scale the box to puff out the chest. Or create bones in the shape of a ribcage and rotate them outward when he needs to puff his chest.

And even if it is supported you're going to want to use it as little as possible because, like I said, it's more expensive than bones.

CheapAlert

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Many game engines don't support vertex-level animation because it's more expensive that bone-level animation. So that's something you really need to find out before going further and possibly wasting time doing something your engine won't support.

[/ QUOTE ]

In addition, since it's per frame, it's gonna make your model eat up shitloads of memory and disk space probably (espeially with higher polycount models)

NoSeRider

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i've got a frog-like character who's belly needs to puff way out before he spits. i've gotten it to work perfectly with the morpher. so what i'm basically asking is, is that a legitimate way to animate 2000 poly characters?

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I did alot of scaling with my models as I animated, my bone rigged models. Seems you can achieve the same effect with scaling portions of the model instead of morphing.

FatAssasin

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I did alot of scaling with my models as I animated, my bone rigged models. Seems you can achieve the same effect with scaling portions of the model instead of morphing.

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AFAIK, scaling portions of a model requires the same engine support as morphing. It's still vertex-level animation. Did you do this for a game, or just to render within the 3D app?

CrazyButcher

actually morphing and per-vertex animation is simpler, thats why it dominated the "old days" like quake1/2/3. The main problems are memory, as CheapAlert pointed out, and the fact you cannot change the animation blended, like rotate a few bones from code (rotate head..).

scaling can work with pure skeletal, but often scaling is disallowed as it is a bit ugly to decompose and such (matrix maths, which the bone stuff is based on), well the engine might support scale just fine, or not, has nothing to do with morph.

Wells

hm. thanks for the info guys. He's using the Torque engine ( Torque DTS Matrix ). Looks like its partially supported? Assuming it is, and i get the go-ahead, can per-vertex animation be combined with skeletal, or is it one or the other per mesh?

FatAssasin

I've seen both cases. The Serious Sam engine used vertex animation exclusively, and a platformer type game I worked on for the Gamecube used a combination of both, but only for the main character. The rest of the characters used bones only.

I would highly suggest going to the Garage Games site and posting this question on the forums there. I'm sure there are some people that have already delt with this issue and can give you a concrete answer. But that chart doesn't look promising, I don't know why it would say "outdated" next to Vertex Animation. Or why it's only partially supported.

These are things you need to find out, and it looks like there's a lot of useful info at http://www.garagegames.com/ .

Good luck.

Wells

Thanks a bunch, fatassassin. posting there now.

Downsizer

We use both. Morphing for cinematics, and boned for in-game animations. Occasionally we swap out models for single run animations. I'll give this example:

Banner (Boned Model) -> Particle or screen fx/blurring -> swap vertex animated model in for growth and morph animation -> swap in Hulk (Boned model). If you take advantage of instanced geometry in modern video cards, there is almost no noticable lag or popup.

Then again, we mostly use this to transition 1st person gameplay to 3rd person cinematic, and back. Rarely is the vertex model controlable.

Richard Kain

Actually, the Source engine uses a curious combination of vertex key and bone animation. All of the body parts are animated using bones. All of the facial animation is done by blending together various vertex keys. So it is quite possible. I haven't checked the Torque engine for this kind of compatibility though.

Wells

well, we decided to use bone animation, thanks for all the imput guys.

but he does, however, want lip-synching. hurrah.

FatAssasin

You can use bones for facial animation also. Check out this link for a nice facial skeleton setup: The Getaway

Wells

yay. i love polycount. thanks Fatassasin!