Re: Main character animations.

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Katie Lauren Lucas wrote:

> Quoting Al Riddoch <ajr@ecs.soton.ac.uk>:
> > The approach we have always taken with this, which I understand is
> > the approach used by professionals, is to create the animations in 3d,
> > and use a high quality renderer to generate the 2d frames. Packages
> > like Poser are available to the this in one package, but are quite costly.
> > In WorldForge we have created tools which generate pre-rendered 2d
> > animations from 3d animated cal3d character animations, but so far we have no
> > affordable or open way of creating cal3d animations. The only viable
> > way appears to be to use 3d studio max.

For simple character animations, you could *try* the 'Exposer' demo program
that comes with my PLIB library.  It was written to show off some simple
skin&bones animation features in PLIB - but it's quite usable for generating
walk cycles and that kind of thing.  Despite it's name, I didn't model it
after Poser (in fact I didn't even know Poser existed - I named my program
'Poser' and then someone told me that I'd better change it!).

Poser animations can be imported into your own application to render them
and capture the frames - such an application could be written quite quickly
in PLIB.

However, if you are used to a big, fancy commercial package, you'll probably
find Exposer laughably trivial...it's only a demo program.

> These are tiny sprites 16x16pixels up to 32x32 - I tried rendering 3D stuff
> down to the right sizes and it Just Doesn't Work.
 
No - you have to render at (say) 256x256, extract the opaque pixels, then
down-filter to whatever resolution you actually need.

----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
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