SkinnedMesh collision detection

I believe one of the examples in the DX8SDK was a collision detection between 2 meshes without bounding spheres. I know for certain there is one for detecting a vector through the mesh. Since each poly has a vector you could just use that to see (also you only have to check certain ones like the hands/feet/head/etc...). I mainly deal with 2D and have always used bounding sphere detection since I wrote my own little .asm detection routine. My solution there would be to set up about 5-6 small spheres (hands/feet/head/etc...) and check those against 3-4 larger spheres on the other mesh (legs together/torso/upper body) You would need to calculate out the x/y/z of the vertex of these spheres/ellipses, but you could do that based on a subset of vertices from the larger mesh i.e. if a hand had verts 0,0,0;0,0,1;0,1,0;0,1,1;1,0,0;1,0,1;1,1,0;1,1,1 (a cute little cube) then its vertex would be .5,.5,.5 with a radius of .866...
Of course this wouldnt work well if you had to check a large number of spheres, but for a reduced set (as in 2 people duking it out) this would work very quickly.

Brett Lynnes
cheez_keeper@hotmail.com

Brett, thanks for your suggestion on using the vector thru mesh algorithm for collision detection. That seems like something that might work -- I''ll check it out. Your second suggestion about setting up spheres would work if the models were static, but the models are animating; thus the spheres would need to move along with the body part that is moving. I''m not sure how to do that by looking at the SkinnedMesh program, but would venture to guess that it has something to do with the bones affecting the skin, and using that information to appropriately move the bounding spheres on that body part. Thanks again for the suggestions, and if anyone else has any ideas on implementing collision detection for the SkinnedMesh program then let me know.