smart skin and export for engines

[detbear]

Hey you gaming gurus who use A:M.

 

Was wondering if Smartskin will show up in animations that or exported? Do you have to bake it somehow prior to export?

 

Is there a helpful thread about this somewhere's?

 

Thanks so much in advance

[robcat2075]

If you are exporting a point cloud or OBJ series , yes, smartskin effects ought to show up in the result.

 

If your export is really bone motion, like with a mo-cap format, then the target model in the other animation app would need to have some equivalent to smartskin in it... which sounds very unlikely.

[John Bigboote]

Like Rob says... MDD would work- because it is point cloud. I don't know what FBX is... skeletal or point-cloud? Either way, most game workflows utilize FBX and we can't get to FBX from A:M.

[DZ4]

I'm not anywhere close to a gaming guru, but in my learning of OpenGL and trying to tie things together with A:M (or any other 3D generation software), I've found no uniform mutually accepted way of doing anything like that. I found one post on a website from a mutually motivated guy while trying to just get bones to work with DirectX, and it was just about finding a piece of code that apparently worked but was totally nonsensical to follow. I got a book on OpenGL graphics where I followed the lessons and made a sphere show up (points or shaded) but the model was not a mesh. It was an algorithm to draw a sphere. So my best guess is... you'd have to break the model down to individual "pieces" and go from there, which is not what you wanted to hear.

 

Cloud, MDD, FBX ?!?!?

 

It's not so hard to accept that what you are asking for hasn't so much not been done yet, except that whoever has figured it out already has a good job somewhere and doesn't have the legal permission to share what he or she devised.

 

From what I've learned with OpenGL, breaking down to basic math to describe a model is where one needs to go, which should not be intimidating if you're interested in actually achieving what you're after. You could likely ask some in depth question on stackoverflow and find out it's well beyond the capacity of any programmer contributing to that site.

 

*Some guy had a program that was called something like VB2DX for A:M and he would be the guy to ask when it comes to Microsoft related stuff, if not OpenGL. But I think Microsoft is on their way out except for PC and business stuff.

I think he was from India, had a family, and sold me the most amazing text deciphering software I ever bought.

 

If you look at the basic OpenGL library, you'll just be amazed as to how that stuff is so available yet so frustrating to work with, or even find which way you're trying to make it work with. So, I would wonder where you're trying to export it to in the first place, take a deep breath, sigh, and go from there. Maybe put your thumb and index finger on your forehead at the same time.

 

I've resolved to focus on just outputting rendered files from A:M to an output that does not try to adapt to actual computer language that describes animation. Just sayin'.

[nemyax]

the other animation app would need to have some equivalent to smartskin in it... which sounds very unlikely

A smart skin is just a special case of a driver. They're in all animation software in some form or other, but not so much in game engines. Although some engines do support simultaneous vertex and skeletal animation.

[robcat2075]

 

the other animation app would need to have some equivalent to smartskin in it... which sounds very unlikely

A smart skin is just a special case of a driver. They're in all animation software in some form or other, but not so much in game engines. Although some engines do support simultaneous vertex and skeletal animation.

 

 

 

"Morph targets" are what I typically think of as being similar to "Smart Skin".

 

If you could write a way to directly translate Morph targets to smartskin and vice versa, that is something people have been wanting for a while.