Animations restirctions
by Scott Army · in Artist Corner · 08/18/2005 (8:42 pm) · 3 replies
Since I'm not a programmer I haven't purchased Torque yet....nor have I taken a look at the basic engine and how it functions. But I was wondering what kinda of restrictions there are for the engine's animation system. Are there restrictions on the number of bones? Can a person use CS to rig their models? How many bones can an individual vert be influenced by? I know that commerical engines ususally only have between 1 and 3 bones influencing each vert. And some engines put restrictions on the total number of bones or what have you. I realize that since a licensee has access to the code base that they could foreseeably write code to allow any of a number of features....but I was just curious, out of the box.....what kind of specs does the engine have in this regard?
About the author
#2
"Are there restrictions on the number of bones?"
There might be, but it's probably quite high. The biggest "restriction" is; The more bones you have, the slower it will be. I've used around 80 bones in some of my models and it worked fine.
"Can a person use CS to rig their models?"
Biped, yes. Physique, no. The exporter only works with the standard max skin modifier (not that much of a problem really. I've come to actually prefer the skin modifier over physique since I started working on models for torque, and if you _really_ like physique there are tools in max to convert between the two).
"How many bones can an individual vert be influenced by?"
Not quite sure, but my guess would be; enough. I've never noticed any problems and I've never checked too closely how many bones were weighted to each vertex. It's definitely more than 1, most likely more than 3 and possibly even more.
edit: oops. Guess Jeff beat me to it. =)
08/18/2005 (9:53 pm)
I can try to answer some of the questions, but I'm "just an artist" too so I'm sure someone will fill in the blanks or correct me if I'm wrong somewhere."Are there restrictions on the number of bones?"
There might be, but it's probably quite high. The biggest "restriction" is; The more bones you have, the slower it will be. I've used around 80 bones in some of my models and it worked fine.
"Can a person use CS to rig their models?"
Biped, yes. Physique, no. The exporter only works with the standard max skin modifier (not that much of a problem really. I've come to actually prefer the skin modifier over physique since I started working on models for torque, and if you _really_ like physique there are tools in max to convert between the two).
"How many bones can an individual vert be influenced by?"
Not quite sure, but my guess would be; enough. I've never noticed any problems and I've never checked too closely how many bones were weighted to each vertex. It's definitely more than 1, most likely more than 3 and possibly even more.
edit: oops. Guess Jeff beat me to it. =)
#3
08/19/2005 (1:54 am)
Thanks for the info. Yeah I'm having one of my good friends rig and animate, unfortunately neither of us is particularly adept at rigging so it's been an extremely painful process to say the least. The models are all modern military type humanoids, but we're having particular trouble getting the skin modifier to deform the shoulders and upper arms correctly. I just wanted to make sure that we don't end up assigning too many bones to individual verts. The models are around 2000 tri's (kind of like middle of the road fps characters) but it's for a planned rts.....we'll be making use of lod and generally have low numbers of units on screen at any given time. But I really want the arm animations to rock. 
Torque Owner Jeff Gran
Not that I know of, but you will see the performance drop as you increase the number
Can a person use CS to rig their models?
Yes
How many bones can an individual vert be influenced by?
Any number, but again this will affect your performance.
Commercial games use the restrictions you're talking about because of the performance issues.