Need some help with mesh animation

Need some help with mesh animation

Dude (guest) 16 Apr 2011 21:22

Well, I saw the mesh by mesh animation tutorial in it was very informative but I was hoping if someone could help me take it a little farther…
While transforming a rotters individually is okay, I'm not sure if that will work the same for say… bending a human arm.
I mean, if i had mesh for the upper arm and a mesh for the forearm there is a high chance there be cracks and it won't look very good when I try to bend it…
What I'm aiming for is a way to maybe have a single arm mesh with two bones in it and have mesh bend/stretch/deform as I transform the bones.
I would appreciate any assistance in how to go about such a thing or a way to cause a similar effect.

Brian (guest) 25 Aug 2011 16:46

This is a bit too complex to answer in a forum easily, but what you are trying to do is definately possible and something all character animators deal with… cracks and breaks. You may want to look into (aka Google) bone weighting or mesh weighting. The concept is that you apply a weight to every vertex in your mesh which lets the bones know how attached they are. This lets some of the vertices stick to the bone more while others deform. It's pretty tricky to get it just right and you'll do the work in a 3D modeler, not XNA. However, for XNA to recognize the weighted bones and use them EVERY vertex must have a weight associated, you can't just weight some and not others. This applies only to a weighted mesh, not your entire model.

I hope that helped somewhat - GL.