Animation Systems

The disadvantages of a mesh based character system is that it has alot of polygons and vertices to handle. Also that you have to position each point of the mesh for every frame instead of them moving all at once.

 The advantages of a skeletal mesh are that instead of moving all the points individually, you only have to move the skeleton. Considering there are only 50 bones, it is very easy to animate.

The first picture shows a character skeleton, this shows all the pivot points that character can bend and transform at. The second picture shows the skeleton inside the character mesh. The skeleton will combine with the mesh so that when the skeleton is moved the mesh will move aswell.

“To ‘weight’ each vertex individually” is the process of snapping the mesh to the skeleton. If the ‘weight’ is decreased then the mesh does not snap to the skeleton properly and the mesh looks deformed.

Here is a picture of a ‘Hierarchical’ skeletal system.

A ‘Hierarchical’ skeletal system works in a very unique way. Instead of all the parts being moved individually, they are connect. This means that if a parent bone is move for example a knee bone, then all corresponding child bones will move aswell like the foot bones.

If I were to animate a character I would use Inverse Kinematics because the movement would be controlled by the hand as that is the body part which is going to pick up the object. Also because the hand is in control the body will follow the hand in a proper fashion like a real body would.

The LOD (Level of Detail) system is the system that works out how many polygons need to be on screen at one time, for example if a building is in the background then it won’t need to be as detailed then if it was in the foreground. The LOD system is very important because it takes some of the strain away from your PC by reduceing the polygon count on objects that don’t need a high level of detail.

Mocap stands for Motion Capture, Mocap is the process of capturing the way a human would react and move in the real world and then transferring it into the game world. When mocapping, actor are dressed in suits that have small white balls placed all over them. Specials cameras that can only see these balls transfer the movements in real time into a computer. Eventually these movements will be use in a game. Here is 2 examples of games that use mocap.

The first game is Rainbow Six: Vegas. Here is an image of actors doing motion capture.

 

Here is a video of motion capture being performed for Rainbow Six: Vegas.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/11692.html

Here is a list of level editing tools.

Sandbox Editor – Crysis

UnrealEd – Unreal

Lunar Magic Level Editor – Super Mario World