To explain, consider the following simple model: The outer object is just a box, normal geometry. The inner object is a billboarded quad. Specifically, the exporter, YABEE, has been modified to spot a game-property named “billboard” (after lower-casing), and to export the geometry like so:
- Carrying a “billboard” tag
- And excluding the world-matrix when collecting its vertices
- Without this, the billboard ends up incorrectly positioned, it seems. See here for more.
This results in the billboard acting as expected:
However, if I then attempt to include the billboard in an animated actor, I encounter a problem:
- If it’s not controlled by the actor’s armature, then it doesn’t move with the animations.
- And if I do have it be controlled via vertex-animation controlled by the armature, it no longer functions as a billboard, and is misplaced.
If feasible, the solution that occurs to me is to have the billboard instead be parented under a node controlled by the armature. In code this can be done via “exposeJoint”–but is there a way to specify such a relationship in the egg-file…?
I’m not familiar with the “Dart” tag offhand, but looking at the egg-file for the test-model above, I do see such a tag under the armature’s group. It currently has the value “1”, but changing that value to be “structured” doesn’t seem to help.