Original Post
I want to program an rp game (I believe you think you've read many posts like this ;) ) but my current problem is about how I do the animation of the player characters. I know how I can do sceletal animation, I think I know how I can do morphing for the characters faces but I want more. I would like to have one character model (or perhaps more for more races) and then attach armor, weapons etc to it, scale it in height, for example bigger arms if the character has more strength so.... I don't want simple retexturing of the modeldata and of course multiple layers of armor above each other (cloths, "hard" armor,..) if the character has more strength and the arms are bigger, the armor has to be bigger as well, but there shouldn't be an extra model for each strength value for the armor part I heard about dismembering the model in parts (amrs, legs, torso,..) and get the parts for the "original" body or the armor and change them as needed. but what if one armor part only needs half of that region and another needs all of it? like a t-shirt goes only half the arm, a pullover goes full down. wouldn't it be a waste for storing all these vertices that are needed for the arm in the t-shirt model and the original model twice for each model because they are the same from the position the t-shirt ends? for the height scaling I thought of scaling the bone system.. the armor has to be somehow related to the bones or the vertices of the model, but I don't have any idea for that basically I thought of using shaders for calculating the vertex positions based on the sceletal bones and perhaps a strength modifier (but currently I'm not so into them, so I don't know what you can and can't do with them) so thats the first part, already very difficult in my eyes. but now to the second and even more difficult one: all this has to be animated with different animations (ok only the scelet must be animated, the rest(vertices) comes with that) but what can I do for.. the cloak or some clothing that hangs down from character? when the character kneels down for example, the clothing part (perhaps from a robe or a cape) should hang down like gravity wants and not stand up in the air just because some bones faced in that direction (I hope you understand what I'm speaking of ^^) I didn't find any helpful articles on that (not here, not anywhere else) but that doesn't mean there aren't some. so if you know of any(links) that could help me, I would appreciate it. or if you could answer some of my (partly unwritten) questions :) ps: sorry for the perhaps bad english, it has been some time I last used it and if you want more info on what I want to do exactly, please ask. It's very possible that I left out parts that I know of but you need for understanding or confused you with my not-so-short sentences - I have to read my text whether I understand it myself *g* ADDED: how do current games do when rendering their characters? for example wow or the new vanguard? of course it's not that complex I like to have, but if you have any information on that perhaps I can get an idea to move from that to my "wishmodel" in wow I believe they are using 1 model for every race/gender and 1 model for each item that could be worn... how exactly do they fit it to multiple models? or am I just wrong with the assumption that the only use 1 model for it? perhaps multiple models in 1 file? I don't know about the modelling format they use ;) [Edited by - haemonculus on September 11, 2006 4:26:06 AM]