Finished Skinning

Finished Skinning

At long last, I've figured out the issues with my file loader. To make a long story short, I was interpreting the bind pose and the animation poses to be in the same frame of reference. However, Milkshape uses the animations as deltas FROM the bind pose. So no bads on Milkshape, but I suppose it could have been spelled out more clearly somewhere...

Anyhow, I figured it out by adding some debug geometry to my models' bone scene graph nodes. Its more or less just geometry that represents the 3 positive axes of that node, but it is immensely helpful in figuring out what is going on with the scene graph. I'll likely be adding this debugging feature as an option in the engine for general testing too. As advertised before, the model isn't much to look at (plus I'm using a flat shader too) but here are some shots with the debug geometry showing what the bones are doing:

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Going forward, it seems to me that GameDev.net is almost encouraging people to write their blogs on other media (blogger, or wordpress) with the forthcoming changes to the website. I'm not sure what the motivation is for doing this, as I think it will dilute the membership here (both from a technical skill level as well as the number of posts that are coming from facebook spam and all the millions of apps floating around out there...). With these changes in mind though, I have begun considering moving this development journal over to wordpress. Honestly, I have had the journal here for a long time, so I'm not sure if I want to move or not (or cross post as some people have been doing). Anybody have any comments or requests on this front? I'm open to suggestions, and am interested to hear others opinions on the coming flood of facebook comments...