Skeletal Animation vs. Baked Animation

#1

I really need to know hands down what’s better, and is it possible to make an engine that mixes the two?

#2

I would venture that both forms have their uses. For example, it is relatively cheap for a game engine to store and move or rotate a bone, and as such, works well for animating characters.

Conversely, it is more expensive to store morph targets (baked animation) in memory, but easier to set them up for facial animation. thus I feel a better choice currently for facial.

Is the use of either technology mutually exclusive? No. Can you use bones for facial, and morph targets for characters, sure. It all really boils down to what you want to do, the amount of memory you have available to you, and platform restrictions.

There are a number of commercially available engines available that support both (Lith-Tech and RenderWare are two off the top of my head), so I would assume there are free alternatives that offer the same features.

#3

I am wondering, have you worked with lith-tech? I have heard a lot of complaints about it.

#4

One thing that’s nice about bones is the verts are interpolated on a curve rather than linear with a morph.

Think of two poses of a finger curling towards the palm… with baked verts, the finger squishes in the middle as it appears to go through itself, whereas with bones it rotates properly.

#5

i’m curious to know…suppose you did have support for both in your game engine, would it be possible to use skeletal for the body and morphs in the head in a single, seamless mesh? or would you have to make the head disjointed from the rest of the model?

pretty sure that half-life 2 uses blendshaping, but i haven’t found any tech docs that really explain how it was implemented.

#6

One thing that’s nice about bones is the verts are interpolated on a curve rather than linear with a morph.

There’s no inherint rule that says this has to be true. spline based keyframe animation (verts) can and has been done. NVIDIA has at least one sample a while back and there are probably dozens more around.

#7

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