Hi,

I'm doing work in custom deformations & rigging; i've got most of the new theory sorted, just need to understand the basics of doing this in esenthel to demonstrate a good result. After importing a mesh with uvw's, I want to:

i. Create a skeleton using a custom interface (already made).
ii. Specify some additional custom constraints on the bones (rotational limit, & some energy functions) - only made in a non-esenthel test.
iii. Reassign all vertex weights using a custom algorithm.

Questions:
1. Is the best way to do this: Create a CSkeleton, add a new Skeleton, add some bones to the Skeleton, Sort the bones?
2. Do I just clamp/dampen the rotations/other constraints in the update loop, or is there a more elegant place to do this? (i'm not talking about secondary deformation constraints on GPU)
3. I'm quite worried about weight assignment, as I searched "weight" and couldn't find anything on how to access it in esenthel. It's really important for my research. How can I change vertex weights, to bones, in code?

Thanks,
Chris

1. create skeleton, setup bones, sort them
create cskeleton from ready skeleton

3. MeshBase::matrix,blend (blend is 0..1 between first and second bone, which is matrix.x, matrix.y)

Thank you!! I'm so relieved about 3, although still a little unclear. Just to clarify setup:

body->base(0).vtx[i].matrix->x = (Byte)Bone1upHierarchy
body->base(0).vtx[i].matrix->y = (Byte)Bone2downHierarchy
body->base(0).vtx[i].blend = 0.5f // (Rubber: between both bones).

Is that correct? (Sounds extremely simple compared to other implementations)
Is there anything else I can do (know about) with the matrix data?

PS, this work will be released in a paper and demo program for people to use in aid of 'the rigging problem'. Looking forward to releasing it.

just please make sure to set correct matrix index value (please check the comments on vtx.matrix), I guess you need to add +1 for bones (comments will explain)

that's all

but you can also read this http://www.esenthel.com/wiki/index.php?t...n_Relation
for more info

Hi, thanks that was really useful. My progress is going well, but i've come across another little thing:

I have a MeshBase (this part must be CPU based) and I need to do something like this:

For each triangle in MeshBase :
Calculate area.
Perform some operations on triangle vertexes and normals.

Here's what confuses me:


Area always returns 0.000 - in debug the watch shows "8.3262930e-006" for area. I'm so confused.

EDIT: Is there something wrong with tri.area() - or am I just doing something silly? As I just tested drawing the tri, and it draws perfectly yet still tri.area() returns 0 or a funny number in debug. EDIT: Ah, think it was just me printing as a Flt rather than Dbl - areas are very small.