Blog of Rob Galanakis (@robgalanakis)

Update incoming

So just some updates on what’s coming:

I will fix some broken links tonight that have been pointed out to me (thanks guys).

By next weekend I should have three new projects uploaded.

First is morph targets via vertex color or textures. I found out after I completed this technique that MS has a DX10 sample in the SDK that uses textures and is pretty awesome, but I’m going ahead with documenting and uploading mine anyway, if only for research/ideas.

Second is “Shader-driven animation.” It is really difficult to explain without a demo, but it is like getting rid of ‘bones’ and instead piping the info directly into the shader, with vertex colors as skinning.

Third and largest is even harder to explain. I call it ‘skinning by proxy.’ You use the vertex colors of a proxy mesh to assign skin weights. It is almost like using geometry as envelopes. It still has a bit of work and improvement to go before it is ready for alpha/beta, but the first two projects are finished and I’m just packaging and documenting them.

I’m pretty bored here with no contract work and waiting to move (start of April), I did visit home for a week though. But it has given me time to work on the scripts and also play Orange Box. Portal was awesome, as were Episodes 1 and 2. And Steam itself I was utterly impressed with, it has been about 2 years since I last really used it, and it has gotten so much better. Way to go Valve, you guys are awesome.

2 thoughts on “Update incoming

  1. hau nghiep phan says:

    nice! do you have an example of your ‘skinning by proxy’?

    1. Unfortunately (or not) I haven’t done much skinning lately at all, so no…

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