Game Development Community

Collision Mesh

by David Fielder · in Torque Game Engine · 02/27/2004 (11:39 am) · 4 replies

Can the collision mesh of a character be animated? For example, if I use a low polygon mesh for my character (and it is animated via bones in the same way that the full mesh is), will then engine use the animation to determine collisions?

Also, is it possible to handle individual bones collisions (perhaps they have cylinders attached to them). For example, if an animation was to have a character lift his/her arms to the side, and a wall is there, is the Torque engine capable (with or without modifications) of detecting the collision of the arm and the wall?

Has any work been done in this field, and if so, could anybody provide me with a link to the appropriate resources?

I don't really need a fully functional "rag doll" system, but it would be nice to simply limit the bones motion based on collisions with objects. (e.g. as bone is about to rotate, if it (or it's children) will collide, then do not rotate).

The reason why I as this is that some characters in the game I am planning on developing will have long limbs (a floppy tail is a possibility) and I'd prefer if the tail did not penetrate walls of narrow corridors.

Dave

#1
02/27/2004 (1:52 pm)
By default, Torque only uses the players bounding box for collision, and does not support using seperate collision meshes (that I know of anyway). However, some in the community have indeed done wrok on a system like you mentioned, which basically creates a box around each bone. Do a forum and resource search for "hitbox" as there are a couple of different approaches.
#2
02/27/2004 (2:28 pm)
Sadly, none of these things are currently in the engine. For the limited sort of stuff you're talking about, you could probably integrate ODE or similar without too much pain.
#3
03/01/2004 (12:18 pm)
Each DTS exporter I have tested has an option to export a collision mesh. Is that collision mesh not used at all? I was under the impression that it was.

Dave
#4
03/01/2004 (5:53 pm)
Unless something changed and I didn't notice, collision meshes for players would be ignored. Also wheeled vehicles only support one collision mesh, instead of the 9 meshes that are supported by StaticShapes(and flyers and hovers too I think).