halflife 2 physics engine

[Laa-Yosh]

Skeletal animation allows a single set of animations to be applied to many different meshes. Without skeletal animation, each mesh would have it's own set of animations, which takes up more memory. It doesn't intrinsicly improve quality, though.

Oh man, not again... I've had a post here somewhere about why skeletial animation is used - the ability to re-use animations is just one of its advantages.

You can read it here:
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=119872&highlight=skeletial

 

[Ostsol]

Skeletal animation allows a single set of animations to be applied to many different meshes. Without skeletal animation, each mesh would have it's own set of animations, which takes up more memory. It doesn't intrinsicly improve quality, though.

Oh man, not again... I've had a post here somewhere about why skeletial animation is used - the ability to re-use animations is just one of its advantages.

You can read it here:
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=119872&highlight=skeletial

Ah. . . well, it looks like my answer wasn't wrong -- just incomplete. . .

By the post you linked to, it looks as if skeletal animation can be used to make animation look more realistic, though it depends on the implementation. All it really appears to do for UT2003, for example, is allow for the ragdoll effects. However, it has the potential to allow for realistic handling of things like walking over an uneven surface, such that feet are hanging in the air or ankle deep in the ground. Basically, it's primary advantage appears to be its flexibility over mesh animation.

 

[Reznor007]

I've had the Porrasturvat one installed on my computer for a while. Highest score I ever got was 89221.

I got 126000 once. It was pretty funny, the guy was bouncing down on his head then I guess it hit a glitch in the program because he suddenly flew forward racking up massive points when he landed on his head at the bottom

Funny app to play with.

I got a glitch once. He landed on his head on a stair, then his head flew several "feet" to the right then reattached itself and gave me 100,000 points. I took a screen cap of it too.

 

[KimB]

By the post you linked to, it looks as if skeletal animation can be used to make animation look more realistic, though it depends on the implementation. All it really appears to do for UT2003, for example, is allow for the ragdoll effects. However, it has the potential to allow for realistic handling of things like walking over an uneven surface, such that feet are hanging in the air or ankle deep in the ground. Basically, it's primary advantage appears to be its flexibility over mesh animation.

Actually, I think its primary advantage is its simplicity.

That is, it's easier for the CPU to deal with the motion of a few bones than it is to deal with the motion of each and every vertex. I mean, with a set of proper rules, I see no reason why one cannot design an animation system that uses no simplified model (bones, in this case) for the animation. Keyframe animation is one such algorithm, one that takes a "snapshot" of the model at various frames of motion.

The way I see it, skeletal animation is nothing more than a compression mechanism: it keeps the CPU from having to deal with every triangle in the mesh when deciding how to animate something. Since the objects frequently animated have large rigid portions, the animation scheme makes perfect sense. I think one of the most obvious immediate benefits of moving to skeletal animation is framerate: the simplified skeletal form makes interpolation between frames of animation almost trivial, such that models don't have to more around in a jumpy fashion (somebody should tell Bethesda this....).