Newb Questions re: General Modelling/ Animation/ 3d Engine

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:o Newb :smiley: but not for long.

I had a couple questions I hoped some generous soul might help me out with - either by way of complete answers or some pointers :slight_smile:

    1. Animation blending - w/ regard to inverse kinematics.

I read of a Mechwarrior game which used animation blending and apparently had a blending system implimented in the engine - Torque engine also presents that feature.

I note that such as Blender also seem to have that capability.

At the first instance I thought this must mean that it may be typical for the 3d engine to blend on the fly - but the second suggested to me that these things might be pregenerated and included in a 3d program all combinations.

Does blender only include that as it also has a basic game engine?

Or is this something typically run through it’s paces to check for animation glitches in the modelling software, then blended on the fly in 3d engine from key-frames?

  1. Is a system of performance scaling typically integrated into an engine or this one specifically?

Does anyone know of middlware for this - especially with regard to Run-time Profiling?

  1. Having looked at SpeedTree, I wondered how much there is by way of opensource or at least low-cost software with similar or same capability?

http://www.speedtree.com

Can anyone point out a few which they might consider near the same league but lacking the 10,000$ price-tag? :Z

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it wouldn’t be trivial to get IK like behavior in the game engine, and the IK constraint doesn’t work in the game engine [neither do any of the others] unless things have changed in 2.41

you can blend animations, but not by combining them, rather the blending is between one animation and another [walk to run] or animations on different parts of the body [walking legs and shooting torso]

no, you’re better off using another engine

at least right now

[and particularly if you can code]

AMD’s Code analyst, Intel’s V-Tune, gnu gprof… I’m sure microsoft has something too but I can’t remember what it is

no such thing, speedtree is teh awesome. There isn’t much of a technical reason it couldn’t be done as open source, except that by licensing speed tree you also get the artwork for lots of different trees… which if you want you can combine into your own trees. Artwork has never been something open source has been able to compete with.

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hhmmm…interesting?!!