Hello,
As part of the 'asset pipeline' for my custom engine I've built a model importer using assimp. The goal is to be able to import models from turbosquid, etc, into a proprietary format without having to significantly rework them. It's worked fairly well, but whereas my game is mostly built around 1 unit = 1 metre, I see FBX (my preferred import format) tends to be 1 unit = 1 cm. On top of that I see a lot of assets from the asset stores that look awesome but are bigger/smaller than I'd like, regardless of units of measurement. I'd like to 'pre-scale' these models on import into my own model file format without just using a scale matrix. (other than this import scale issue I don't have need for scaling in the engine, and it can complicate a lot of other systems).
I've spent a week battling blender with my entry-level modeling skills, and can sort of work my way through the crazy unit issues it has with FBX to scale down the based model/armature, but as far as I can tell there is no simple way to just 'apply scale' to animations without a lot of manual work in the graph view.
Assimp has a 'global scale' capability in newer versions, but that seems to just apply a scale transform to the root bone.
Given that I just want to apply a uniform scale to all aspects of the model, it feels like during my model import 'post process', I should be able to just scale the translate of all bone transform/offset matrices, and scale the vertices of all bind-pos mesh data. If I apply the same scale to any location/translate key frames of animations, shouldn't this all 'just work'? That way I could store my models in proprietary/engine format at the scale I want without any screwing around at run-time within the game itself...
Any insight would be greatly appreciated...usually I have no trouble finding lots of good reading about game programming issues, but this seems to be a surprisingly murky subject.
