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View Full Version : Animations and character setup in new games (RE4, MGS3 ...)

lukinec
04-15-2005, 09:58 AM
I'm looking for any informations about technical aspect of animations in games - for example - resident evil 4 or any other game, with not so low-poly characters (4-10k of triangles).

We've got a problem, because, in (i think in any) our engine are vertex transformations little expensive. So we decided to have only vertexes which are influenced with one or two bones with exact weight ratio (0,25,50,75,100%). This way is little bit hard for animators - to setup character with this limitations, but it's possible

With our new game, we want to have nicer, more polygonal and more elastic-) characters , so we look on resident evil, metal gear solid or new Unreal vids .... - their characters setup is great, they have more polygons, but alll that games runs on 2-3x slower hardware, than our game. I dont know, if they have any limitations or making characters LODs, or dont using weights on vertexes and influencing it in another way....but I'm sure, that they must have vertexes influnced with more than two bones, with wider range of weights, BUT it's impossible to have not ANY limitation, because of hardware

If anybody knows something about that, or knows, that we doing something very wrong, please tell me.

thnx
Gräck
04-24-2005, 08:43 AM
i dont know if you are doing anything wrong.
but i can tell you that you can improve your performance when using hardware skinning. i am not a programmer so i cant tell you how to do that.
influences on only one or two bones per vertex is definitely not enough. you need at least three.
i am also not sure if they are using morph targets for facial animation or bones. i think when you dont have much experience in using morph targets and improving the memory usage for that (morph targets need much data), you should use bones for facial animation. they work also very good for facial animation and have a lot of advantages, too.
for example, we are using bones for facial animation as well (with the ogre engine). it works very well but i dont know if it is useable for lower hardware power.
so as i said, check hardware skinning, i dont see any other things to improve yet.
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04-24-2005, 08:43 AM
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