Animated Vertice Shader

[markjacksonguy]

I guess this question is better suited for Drwr or rdb -

I’m still using Panda 1.7.0 and will most likely finish my current work with that version (openGL).

I wanted to know if the config setting

hardware-animated-vertices #t

good to use?

Doesn’t it even work?

[wezu]

I’m neither Drwr nor rdb but one of them already answered that question

[hardware animated vertices and GL_ARB_vertex_blend)

@drwr

This is an outdated extension. It was intended to implemented GPU skinning on a fixed-function card. It was never really very widely implemented, and not really useful even when graphics drivers implemented it. In modern graphics drivers, it is preferred to write a custom shader to handle the GPU skinning instead.

Unfortunately, Panda doesn’t provide any hooks into such a custom shader, and would not be able to load your standard animation files into the custom shader. You would have to write all of the required infrastructure yourself.

One day we hope to provide these kinds of hooks, when some industrious volunteer adds the needed code to Panda. Until then, you will have to stick with CPU skinning.

David

[markjacksonguy]

Actually, I just wanted to know if

hardware-animated-vertices #t

Did anything at all.

[drwr]

It might, but only if (a) your graphics card supports that OpenGL extension, and (b) your animation is simple enough that it can be handled by the extension.

You can set:

show-vertex-animation 1

in your Config.prc to flash the animated vertices. If they flash red, they’re animated via the CPU. If they flash green, they’re animated via the GPU.

David

[markjacksonguy]

I bet some of my configs didn’t work because of the #

basic-shaders-only #t

Doesn’t that # comment out the value? That’s how my config file was setup and the whole time I was just changing the #f to #t.

I guess I should get rid of the #.

or …

Maybe that actually works? (#t, #f)

---------update-------------
The # doesn’t matter, so I guess everything is fine.

[drwr]

#f and #t are understood to stand for false and true, respectively. They are the same thing as f or t, or 0 and 1, in the prc file. A hash mark only means a comment when it is the first thing on a line.

David