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Why not Physique?

by Erik Madison · in Artist Corner · 02/18/2004 (2:38 pm) · 5 replies

This is by no means a rant.
Why does Torque use Skin rather than Physique? Both appear, to my limited knowledge, to be about the same in capability and ease of use. Physique however seems to be pretty much the standard for most games (that use skeletal of course).
I'm just really curious why Dynamix chose one over the other...
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Associate Logan Foster
perPixel Studios
#1
02/18/2004 (3:28 pm)
Getting the weighting data from Physique is much more difficult, primarily because Physique uses influences to control vertex deformation while the Skin modifier actually has a weight value explicietly assigned to each vertex.

AFAIK I haven't ever heard of Physique being a standard. The biped rig perhaps, but definately not Physique. The Skin modifier is more more advanced and well suited for animation work than Physique (this is not just my opinion but the opinion of many other Max animators out there too).

Logan

Torque Owner Joe Maruschak
#2
02/18/2004 (3:44 pm)
Back then, Physique was slow, like REALLY slow.. skin was fast. Also, 80% of the extra stuff physique does isn't supported in the engine. AND, it did not make sense to have every artist needing character studio. 3 of several reasons.

Torque Owner James Sun
#3
04/14/2004 (1:41 am)
So any chance that there will be an update to Physique exporter? ToT

Associate Logan Foster
perPixel Studios
#4
04/14/2004 (9:22 am)
The only chance of this is if you got your programmer to do it for you, otherwise don't hold your breath.

If you are attached to Physique for some strange reason, you might want to check out sparks.discreet.com and look for the Physique <--> Skin Conversion Tool that will allow you to convert from one to the other.

Logan

Torque Owner Alex Swanson
#5
04/14/2004 (11:22 am)
Physique doesn't offer any additional features over Skin that are useful for real-time simulations, afaik. See Joe's comments above.