SKINNING: How does Morph Gizmo function?

[rawbot69]

We are a small team of game developers. We are exporting an animation of a model into our RenderWare 3D Engine. The problem is that RenderWare does not support morph gizmos and any other gizmo that 3D Studio max uses internally. We are thinking to create a patch for the engine that will allow us to export this information and create identical animation to that of 3d studio max inside our engine. This is vital to our success because we place quite an importance on our animation due to our complexity of the fighting engine. Anyways, I would like to find out how 3D Studio Max Animation Gizmos work, where do I find this information? Are there any docs available on the net or anything we can purchase? I would really appreciate this.

Arseniy

 

[flick556]

I'm pretty sure that 3ds max does not allow the export of this information in a meaningful way and if they did their would probably be patent or other proprietary considerations.

Some good places to start would be looking at Subdivision surfaces and NURBS in general. Rhino supports a format called OPENnurbs and its specifications are in the public domain, your engine could possibly support this format. I personally still find that to be tougher than implanting your own format that matches closer to your engines api. Depending on your target hardware platform direct-x and open gl support hardware accelerated higher order surfaces, the api to work with surfaces under dx I find to one of the more straightforward, but the hardware to support them is pretty new and I have yet to find a software implantation.

Given the parametric nature of HOS it allows for the kind of morphs and other modeling effects you see in the various modeling packages, but doing these things is not trivial.