Game Development Community

Expanding Meshes - Galaxies / City of Heroes

by Quest Johnny · in Torque Game Engine · 01/29/2005 (9:47 am) · 1 replies

I'm baffled by this one .. In City of Heroes / Galaxies and console Wrestling games - they let you move sliders and control a chr's mesh's overall weight, height, and musculature, or width of face.

Now, I can see of a way it could be done, by having 1 mesh for EVERY combination - but that seems to me impossible. I wonder if those meshes could be linked to some animation, and using blended animations?

Anybody have any idea how that is done? :) I don't want to use it, as such, I'm just deathly curious.

#1
01/29/2005 (10:11 am)
I'll venture a guess, and say they're always using the same skeleton/biped for the basic character archetypes, and dynamically "scaling" the skinned mesh around that skeleton.
Since it's not done during gameplay, but at "load time", you can deal with the recalculating normals without introducing hiccups in the framerate.