Hi There - I’m a jME newbie with a question about character animation formats. I’d like to do a game with several hundred lo-poly animated characters, all canned animation (no ragdoll stuff). There would be a maximum of about 20 character ‘types’ at use at once.
What would be a suitable animation format to use to (a) animate efficiently and (b) go light on memory given that there would be multiple instances of the same mesh data in different animation states?
TIA
Peter.
Noone has any advice to offer at all?
C’mon guys, I’m a jME noob - a little help would be nice ;o)
My model animation system will eventually support non-skeletal animations (that’s one of my priorities now, in fact) but doesn’t yet. It’ll probably be a week or two before I get that done though.
Depending on the hardware you want to support, something like MD3 might be your best bet. It does mesh deformations between keyframes. JME requires a single frame of each “instance” of a model and another entire copy of the mesh for each keyframe of the animation (those these are shared among all instances). Then the “morphed” mesh gets adjusted as the model is animated using the keyframes as reference data.
I haven’t looked at CDF’s MD5 code but I assume he uses shader programs to update the mesh based on the position of the bones which is a non-starter if you want to support graphics cards that don’t provide programmable shaders.
I haven't looked at CDF's MD5 code but I assume he uses shader programs to update the mesh based on the position of the bones which is a non-starter if you want to support graphics cards that don't provide programmable shaders.
No it doesn't. And even if it would, it would only requires ARB_Vertex_Program which any old card has anyway (ATI 9200 has those capabilities and its REALLY cheap, and albeit really crap). But you are right, some people will not be able to run it, but the percentage isn't as high as you think...
chaos, it would be nice to provide the vertex_program pathway if its available, it would free up more CPU time for other, more CPU intensive things. E.g. physics! :)
DP
GMax is the free one from the people who made 3dsmax. So naturally, 3dsmax too. Blender can as well, Maya, XSI I believe needs a plugin…
So pretty much anything 
gmax has a separate export plugin than max. But both work quite well.
maya I think requires have doom3 game purchased, as well as XSI (I have this one) .Also there was an effort on exporting an md5 from XSI without need of having the game…
Yep, is a great format.
SOme friends are doing c++ stuff , engines and that, and tend to choose md5, and play with scripts manipulating channels, meaning a channel for the animation of a bone, and more advanced stuff.
plugins, downloads, etc :
http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewforum.php?f=3