Fish Bones

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6 Comments

Comment by Steve on July 8, 2009 at 7:49am

Yes morphing is all well and good but it still uses the CoordinateInterpolator to animate the mesh. Thyme is talking about using setByVertexTransform or mHanim which animated just a subset of vertices and doesn't use the coordinateInterpolator at all. Simply animated certain vertice groups using a regular orientationInterpolator contains far less data, as thyme has said. It basically works just as an avatar does from av studio. then multiple animations could even be used depending on what you want it to do.

Comment by alain on July 8, 2009 at 2:59am

indeed the morpher takes 2 minutes to be used

http://dumenieu.free.fr/louizeforum/seamless/perch_anim2.wrl

If I could say how I feel , I must admit that I use modellers depending of what I want to do .

And to morph shapes it is not rare that I use seamless3d , because it is very easy

Comment by thyme on July 7, 2009 at 2:49pm

Hi Steve I much appreciate your willingness to learn some seamless :)
I fully understand how new software feels alien when you are used to doing things differently (I feel lost in other modelers the same), however with your deep understanding of VRML and my help, you should be able to quickly relate much of seamless back to VRML.
If you can export your fish to using only plain VRML Transform, Shape, OrientationInterpolator, TimeSensor nodes and ROUTEs from max, this should make it very easy to learn seamless basics from a VRML perspective.
Seamless can import these VRML nodes and convert them to its native part nodes.
To begin with you can think of a Part node (the nodes that look like bones) as a VRML Transform and Shape node contained in a single node.
After getting your cut up mesh imported into Part nodes we can join the vertices back together and export to HAnim and/or setByVertexTransform.

Comment by Steve on July 6, 2009 at 11:33am

unfortunately I didn't have a way to export the animation with either of those 2 methods but would be very much interested to learn this method. I must admit I am kind of lost in seamless but would love to learn to do this. I am always interested in optimization wherever I can get it. :)

Comment by thyme on July 4, 2009 at 6:18pm

Your animated fish looks very good Laz :)
There are alternatives to using CoordinateInterpolators for Contact that require a fraction of the data.
Contact can utilize the setByVertexTransform method (what avatar studio avatars use) or HAnimJoint nodes.
Both setByVertexTransform and HAnimJoint type animation (known as "skinning") revolve around applying a mesh to a skeleton.
Skinning involves transforming the vertices rather than morphing a number of meshes.
Worms, snakes and fish make for a good starting point to learn about skinning type animation.
Please see my worm animation tutorial which should use much the same concepts as the fish bone tutorial you used but will export a skinned model for VRML/X3D:

Worm Animation

You can also import a static mesh and apply a skeleton to it:

Bringing Static Models to Life

It would be great to see more animators learning about skinning. It is the standard way organic models are animated for real time today and it's not that different in concept to animate a model using regular VRML transform nodes.

Comment by Steve on July 2, 2009 at 11:56pm

If you want to read about this example go to:
Laz' Blog - ABNET Forum