Procedural bone animation

Hi all,

i'm working on a procedural skeletal animator (with ken perlin at NYU). actually its more or less done in java, and i want to port it to torque. what it does is allow the user to set a wide variety of movement parameters at run-time which modify the motion of a bipedal character. it basically allows characters to dance in a reactive way, on the fly, without having to make multitudes of animation sequences.

so, my question is one of approach. i'm not exactly sure the best place to "slip" my code in. i have a character model, it will be an aiPlayer, but it will not have any animation sequences. every frame i calculate and update the bone positions. i see that in tsShapeInstance class i could iterate the bones and set their positions something like this:

for (U32 i=0;i<mShape->nodes.size();i++){
   Point3F pos;   
   pos = mNodeTransforms[i].getPosition();
   pos.x++;pos.y++;pos.z++;                         //just a dumb change
  mNodeTransforms[i].setPosition(pos);
}

however, i'm not sure if tsShapeInstance is the right place to be messing with the bones. what i think i should be doing is replacing the existing animator with my own instance, or subclass the existing animation class to override the dts sequences with my calculated bone transforms.

naturally i'm having a little trouble finding the classes that control the animation of an aiPlayer. any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,
j