Animated mesh with multiple weights
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Animated mesh with multiple weights
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| Hi, Has anyone got an animated b3d format mesh with multiple weights for me to play with? The same mesh with only 'rigid' weights would also be nice for the sake of comparison. [edit]Actually, I can emulate this so don't bother.[/edit] Thanks! |
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| blimey... it wouldn't take us long if you still need it. |
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| How many are you planning on putting in? Weights per vertexs i mean :) |
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| Wasn't TigerZ making one? |
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| the direct sdk comes with one in the media folder. |
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| but is it b3d? |
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| Surely it is an .x file - but which one is it? |
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| Mark, I emailed you a B3D model that ought to be weighted. Good luck, and thanks a lot for tackling this. ^_^ |
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| Anyone know exactly which tools already export weighted verts in b3d files? Max (+b3dpipeine) LW Unwrap CharacterFX Milkshape |
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| ultimate unwrap supports it as i heard, hopefully the person who wrote pipeline exporter for b3d will see this thread :) but MS3D doesnt support weighted bones :( i could definetly send you one, which format would u require it to be in? |
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| Here is the animated .x model from the DirectX8 SDK including a model viewer. Can someone confirm it is weighted and send mark a .b3d conversion from Ultimate Unwrap? www.nitrologic.net/simon/tiny.zip |
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| Unwrap mangles it for some reason. |
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| I'm going to send it to Brad. |
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| mmm can't wait/weight |
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| I'd venture to say this is probably the single most important feature missing from Blitz. All the fancy pants stuff like bump maps, stencil shadows and shaders, and even less exciting but useful things like DXTC and more UV sets pale into insignificance compared to the ability to have some well animated characters in our games. I hope this makes it in. |
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| mmm can't wait/weight It'll certainly be a weight off my mind. |
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| It turns out that Unwrap only *displays* rigid bone weights, but imports and exports them fine. So, I've sent the b3d to Mark. |
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| Ahh way to stir up some intrest and get us all wondering what your upto Mark ;) Nice one. I hope your gona show us some screen shots soon. |
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| Mark - whilst you are fiddling around in there, how about giving us access to the *current* bone-translated vert positions? Would be very useful for us. |
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| I prepared this model a while ago. It was exported with blended vertex weights, but I cannot verify that the export worked correctly, and in fact I have reason to believe the weights are no good. Still, here ya go: www.3darteest.com/adele.zip |
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| jhocking - looks to me like its weighted fine. |
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| SEE, MARK DOES LISTEN, WHEN HE GETS TIME :) |
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| Thanks Mark, for looking at this feature! |
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| yep, im very very happy that he is :-D |
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| Me three :) Jason. |
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| Yowza, It seems to be working!! Up to 4 bones-per-vert are supported, each with its own weight. Just undergoing some pre-release testing, but should be out soon. |
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| cool mark, 4 is more than enough. 3 is common if I am not mistaken. well done that man. |
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| Will the system automatically choose the four bones per vert which have the most influence over it? Is there a speed hit associated with this? Will X format now be supported? |
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| wahoo! Great - can't weight - oh that's already been said huh!? IPete2. |
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| This is fantastic news. It definitely changes what can be done with Blitz. Thanks Mark! Sswift's question is a good one - if a program exports data where the vert has more than 4 bones assigned, will it strip out the bones with the lowest influence? This might help avoid problems with models exported via enveloping. |
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| Vertex weights - wo-hoo! I thought that this day would never come... I guess that we will be getting Modulate2X too with the next upgrade, so that leaves only DXTC to my wishlist. And working bumps of course, because they are not currently really supported at all... to me grayscale bumps (DOT3) would be quite enough, they are easier to do etc than Normal Maps and still a very good game-gfx feature. |
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| I'm going to need something better than milkshape to deal with weighted bones aren't I :/ |
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| you couild say we 'influenced' his decision on this. really pushing the 'envelope'. |
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| Wow, Mark. That's awesome. 4 Bones per vert is very nice! Thanks for listening!! |
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| Will the system automatically choose the four bones per vert which have the most influence over it? Yes. It picks the 4 'heaviest' and normalizes the weights so they add to 1. Is there a speed hit associated with this? Yes for surfaces with max_bones_per_vert>1, but it will depend on just how many >1 verts there are. Will X format now be supported? No. |
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| This is great news Mark! While you're fiddling with animation stuff, may I comment about the way transitions are done from 1 animation cycle to the next. When changing from 1 anim cycle to another, Blitz currently seems to tween from the current frame (at the time the command is issued) to frame 1 of the new frame, over the period of time specified. How hard would it be to get some true blending in there? Here's a small avi of how a tool works in Lightwave called Motion Mixer, if you've ever seen or used a video editor, the layout will be straight forward. You have your animation cycles as you do in Blitz, but you can throw in a transition from one to the next. If the cycles are lined up nicely, you get a smooth transition. Divx codec, 350k http://www.tomspeed.com/blended_animation.avi I'm guessing there wouldn't be much of an overhead compared to the old tweening method, just a matter of continuing to look up the old animation cycle frames until the transition is complete, although there may be a need for a new command to accomidate some extra paramaters maybe? Maybe in a future update? :) Thanks for the blended weighting!!! Tom |
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| w00000000000000000t!!!!!!!! this is incredible news!!! 'vive la blitz'! |
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| " Yowza, It seems to be working!! Up to 4 bones-per-vert are supported, each with its own weight. Just undergoing some pre-release testing, but should be out soon." So, where do I send the "thank you" card? Man, all those people who've been complaining that Mark is slowing down on updates, what do you have to say now? |
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| Thank you so much Mark this has made my year :) I do agree with what Tom says above too, that would be cool and also some spline based animation transitions like CharacterFX does as at the moment we get a nice smooth looking walk cycle in CFX and after import into Blitz some of that smoothness of movement is lost. All in all fantastic news. BTW is CharacterFX capable of exporting weighted bones if not then what will? All the best, Jason. |
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| "Man, all those people who've been complaining that Mark is slowing down on updates, what do you have to say now?" It's about time? ;-) |
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| CharacterFX is does support blended vertex weights and does export them to b3d file format. I wouldn't assume it does so flawlessly since Blitz3D doesn't support blended vertex weights yet, but I imagine any bugs wouldn't take them long to work out. As for the keyframe interpolation, the solution at the moment is to lock down your animations, setting a keyframe on every bone every frame before exporting. You can do this in CharacterFX by scrolling through the frames in the Keyframe Editor and hitting the "key plus" icon at the top; obviously, do this right before exporting and then undo (do NOT save.) This is a hassle of course and spline interpolation in real-time would be nice, but the additional computational overhead would probably become an issue, plus after this there are other updates Mark has to work on which I would consider a higher priority (like getting Blitz working on MacOS!) @ sswift: whap whap WHAP |
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| Well.... All good things come in the natural course of time as usaul!!! Excellent work Mark...!! Can't wait to get my grubby hands on this update!!!!! |
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| Yup - sounds great. |
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| Great.....now I'll have to go buy myself software that works with weigthed bones. :-/ (hope CharacterFX is any good) Anyway, since you seem to be on a role atm in updatin B3d Mark......any chance you could add some other "things", ooh, say, load media from banks, or additional sound\video functions? |
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| Man, all those people who've been complaining that Mark is slowing down on updates, what do you have to say now? How about:Keep the updates coming, I'll tell you when to stop. ;P |
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| Or: I've got quite a bone, and I didn't need weights/pills! |
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| but surely the spllne interpolation is done in your 3d program. if it exports every frame to blitz, its just a snapshot of that interpolation surely. therefore there shouldn;t be any problems with smoothness. its never caused me any problems anyway. |
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| This'll look really cool with ragdoll!!!! :P can't wait! thanks mark! |
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| Great news!!! Cant wait to test it!! ;-) |
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| Ruz: that's why I explained how to lock down a snapshot of the interpolation. CharacterFX does not do this automatically when exporting b3d files. |
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| doh, I see. seems like a pretty basic thing for a charatcer animation package though. suprised it dosn 't do that automatically. |
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| Yeah, I should suggest they add a checkbox for that option when you export. |
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| I second that JHocking :) Development seems slow however with CFX lately. Good luck though if you do try to get it implemented. Jason. |
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| ooh i cant wait, so many models all ready to go! |
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| This is awesome... thanks Mark. |
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| Yeah, I should suggest they add a checkbox for that option when you export. Like PaceMakers Hi-Fi option ! |
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| Blitz never stops getting better! The next update will blow everybody's pants off :D |
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| But, but... I've only got one pair! |
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| Nyah nyah, I've got two pairs. |
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| Mine have weighted vertices :O |
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| The next update will blow everybody's pants off :D great... we finally get to see if Pantsonhead has a bald spot ! |
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| The next update will blow everybody's pants off :D im more interested in whats under the pants getting blown :) |
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| Ooooo k, let's stop right there, remember there's young people who frequent these forums. Cheers Tom |
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| I'm jealous, you didn't say that when I was talking about my use of weights on bone(s)! |
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| Ooooo k, let's stop right there, remember there's young people who frequent these forums. i was talking about pantsonhead' head ;p |
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| Do we have a prospective release date on this? |
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| If so will it come with modulate 2x? |
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| Hi, Release date is as soon as the web server move settles down. And yes, it will come with Modulate2 - TextureBlend 5, surprise! |
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| @Sinu, You're very open about your...sexuality, aren't you? |
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| Oooo can`t wait :) Thanks again Mark. Jason. |
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| And yes, it will come with Modulate2 Cool! This next update seems to be really useful... last one was bit of a downer because the DOT thing was what is was. Any chance of getting "working" bumps in the future Mark? And/or DXTC? |
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| Bump mapping would be a great addition I agree and it seems that the framework is already in. If we could just specify a greyscale image to use it it would be neat :) Jason. |
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| big thanx mark, you are giving us what we really want, i think we will see a huge improvement in character animation/mesh detail due to weights as we need not worry about rigid weights and it's limits. @Sinu, You're very open about your...sexuality, aren't you? im only kidding about. |
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| what is modulate 2/texture blend 5 ? sounds interesting |
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| I think its a kind of dodge and burn mode for textures to go with the additive and multiply modes we already have but don`t qoute me on that ;) The suspense is killing me. Really can`t wait for that update. Jason. |
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| Upto 4 blends per bone - yay! [edit - I meant four blends per vertex, I was just too excited!! ;) ] Modulate 2x is the same as modulate except it multiplies the result by 2; result = (a*b)*2 Handy if you use CShop to build levels because this is the blend it uses to display the lightmaps, not sure why he choose this blend as its not correct diffuse lighting - but it looks nice anyway ;) |
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| so basically with this mode my light maps will look better? |
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| Ruz: Yeah, now lightmapping programs can do an overbright/burnt out effect. |
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| Yes as lights will make the texture brighter. At the moment this doesn't happen, it only reveals the texture up to the normal brightness. |
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| Just want to say, really looking forward to the next update. I'm sure the server has settled down by now. :D |
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| gotcha, thats sounds good. looking forward to it. |
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| so basically with this mode my light maps will look better? Basically, yes. At least it's now possible to do other than just darkening... for example Max Payne 2 used M2X - and the levels looked GOOOOOD. :) M2X test: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=27774 |
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| Thanks mark. |
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| Looking forward to the update as always.. nice work Mark :) |
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| I have absolutely no idea what weighted bones are... in fact I'm not altogether sure what bones are. Can someone indulge me by giving me a brief lowdown so I can get really excited as well? |
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| it means smooth animation and deformation instead of robotic animation, just say 'yay' |
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| That's gona save a lot of work! :) (scratches custom model format with weighted animation off the todo list) |
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| I'm sure the server has settled down by now. :D Funny you should say that. I was just thinking how settled down the server seemed today. :) |
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| settled?, its calm as a mill pond, now gimme that update ( pretty please) |
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