Objects with morph sliders and other joints?

Pipeline
#1

I was just wondering: is it possible to have a model in Panda that uses both Morph sliders and skeletal animation?
If so, what kind of structure would the animations need to have?

I ask this because I’m planning to implement Morph sliders for my Blender exporter, and if it can be combined with skeletal animation, it changes the implementation quite a bit.

#2

Of course it can. This is the idea of skeleton-morph animations. Typically, a human will be animated with a hierarchy of joints for the main body animations, plus a number of morphs for facial animations.

Not sure what you mean about the structure of the animation. The hierarchy of joints is a hierarchy; the list of morphs is a list. Panda manages both of these internally. I have no idea how Blender does it.

David

#3

Sorry, I should’ve been more specific when asking about the “structure”. I meant to ask whether an animation table for a model containing both morph sliders and a skeleton should always contain entries for both even if one of them doesn’t vary during the animation.

Also, I see the ripple.egg file has a sort of “dummy” skeleton. Is that necessary for morph slider animations to work?

#4

Ah. Yes, the rule is: you always have to have at least one bone in your hierarchy. However, you’re allowed to have 0 morphs.

So, a character can be skeleton-only, or it can be skeleton+morphs. But it can’t be morphs-only.

An animation table should always have entries for all of the bones and sliders that exist in the character, even those that aren’t moving in this particular animation.

David