DTS with Morphs

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For a game I'm building, I wanted to use morphs for some of the character animations. But instead of the vertex animation (which makes huge file) I wanted to predefine a morph by just those points I needed to move and then control them with a float value on each frame, 0.0 being no morph applied and 1.0 being fully applied, with values greater than one and negative allowed.

My implementation defines morphs for detail level 0 only, assuming farther away they will not be visible and to keep the runtime impact down. Morphs are much faster then bone animation, but every little bit is important.

As you can see in the DTS shape.h and mesh.h files, I added morph controls to the shape and sequence definition and morph data to the mesh definition. I added it to the base mesh in the engine, so you can use morphs on both skinned and standard meshes (boned and unboned).

In the engine, morphs are only applied if the current frame value is not 0.0. If 0.0, the morph processing is skipped.

All the places I made changes in the files (there are a lot) are marked with my initials - DSM, so you can find them easily. Code changes are only in the ts engine folder and DTSsdk folder.

Since the coding is done for both the engine and the exporter library, hopefully this will make it into TGE 1.4 and TSE (I'd be happy to put it in either of those guys, if desired - I have a TSE copy also).

I have tested some simple human models with morphs and I'm now building my game models that will use several morphs each.

Code Example for loading a morphs in an exporter:

In the Mesh loader -
// set dummy entries for morphs - setting local morph to shape morphs to be the same (same as for bones)

for(i=0;i M->morphIndex.push_back(i);
}

// push morph data
for(i=0;i for(j=0;jused;j++){ // for each vertex referened by this morph (only verts affected by this morph - you do NOT need to use them all!!
int curPt = mlist[i]->offsets[j].ptindex; // getting vert index

M->mindex.push_back(i); // which morph
M->mvindex.push_back(curPt); // which mesh vert index
M->mverts.push_back(DTS::Point(mlist[i]->offsets[j].offset.x * Scale,-mlist[i]->offsets[j].offset.z * Scale,
mlist[i]->offsets[j].offset.y * Scale)); // morph offset at setting 1.0

}
}

IN the shape loader - I do after materials and before nodes

// Load list of morphs

DTS::Morph mp;

mlist = curmesh->GetMorphList();
mcount = curmesh->GetMorphCount();
for(i=0;i mp.name = addName(mlist[i]->name) ;
morphs.push_back (mp) ;
morphDefSettings.push_back (mlist[i]->value) ; // can be just 0.0
}

Added to sequence set up- I do during bone export, so I only set them up when processing bone zero

s.baseTranslation = nodeTranslations.size() ;
s.baseRotation = nodeRotations.size();
s.baseMorph = morphSettings.size();


s.matters.morphs.assign (mcount, false);

for (i = 0 ; i < mcount ; i++)
{
s.matters.morphs[i] = true;
}


for (i = 0 ; i < bcount ; i++){
for (j = startSeq ; j <= endSeq ; j++){
if(i == 0){ //set morph settings only for bone zero (will be the same for all bones)
for (k = 0 ; k < mcount ; k++) // for each morph
{
morphSettings.push_back(mlist[k]->value); // morph setting for this frame
}
}

That's all the code I added to my ToolBox DTS exporter to support morphs (based on the milkshape exporter example).

Why morphs? They are faster than bones, they can simulate hard to do dynamics (I use them to animate hair and cloth for one) as well as the usual morph tricks - face animation, talking, changing from one critter to another, pulsing objects.

Have fun with morphs!

This is my first contribution to Torque. I'm building a game using just my ToolBox app (my pet project) and Photoshop in addition to TGE. This is making me add all the parts I find missing - like I just added a texture resize function, as my textures are always an invalid size.
The new map2dif got past a lot of dif export problems I was having. I can finally export all the special node and light types and just added the path nodes so I can pre set them up in ToolBox.