New Animation System

hi
its been more than a month since i updated this blog, the reason is that i just didn't save time for taking screenshots/create a video and update the blog.
so here i'm finding few minutes to write about the new things i implemented, hopefully updating with screenshots/videos on the next post ;)
list of things i'v working on:
1. new animation system
2. abandon md5 file format and use internal format (writting exporter from maya)
3. real-time atmospheric scattering
4. HDR
5. read shaderx6 :)

the first thing i wanted to rewrite for along time is the animation system, calling it animation system is a nice joke, but still it could play different animations for different parts of the model, do some kind of blending and at the time it was enough.
but the time is come and i wanted more advanced system which allows me control and create animation on the fly, adding sse and such...
the new animation system based on blend trees, what it means is that you can apply operations/operators on trees and get a new tree as a result.
the system designed so the operators works just like in math, you apply operator get a result and apply another operator on it and so on...
so how this is going to help with animation?
when doing skinned animation, you need few things:
a. model with weights
b. bind pose skeleton
c. animation data for that bind pose skeleton
this skeleton form a tree, so you can define the operations in term of animation and you are set.
you can thing of animation as a list of skeletons which defines new position & orientation for this skeleton or just list of that skeleton with different poses.
the operations i'm using is:
a. subtract tree A from tree B - useful for separating certain parts from specific animation, for example: you have walk animation which moves both hands and legs, but you want to separate it to two new animations one that moves on the legs and another for moving the hands.

b. multiple tree A with tree B - useful for merging two trees to form merged animation, for example: merging the two animation created in a and get the original animation (the one which moves both hands and legs)

c. transition from tree A to tree B - the is by far the most useful operation, this create a transition from one animation to another by setting transition/blend factor [0..1], what this means is for blend factor 0 tree A will be the returned, 1 tree B will be returned, for 0.5 for example a tree between A and B will be returned. so why is it so useful? well imagine you have a character that have walk,run animations and you want to play walk animation for velocity under 10 and run over 50, but what happens between 10 and 50? well you can use the velocity to compute blend factor to be used to create smooth transition between walk and run and run to walk.

when setting animation is just a matter of setting list of skeletons, but when implementing you don't want to switch from one skeleton to another in one frame, what you want is to create smooth transition between one skeleton to another, for example: skeleton from frame 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4 and so on... the result is a skeleton inbetween old frame skeleton and current frame skeleton, this skeleton used as input to other operations.
also, the animation system works hand by hand with the new engine format 'oge', used for both static and animated models, this format created using the new exporter i wrote.
next time i will write about the other things i worked on...
cya