DeleD Community Edition

[Stiglr]

I know it's always a sore subject with software development, but these two features are, for me, crucial.

Is there an "expected" date for animation and Collada export features?
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[chronozphere]

Noone can do a thing as long as the exporters are not opensource (They will be in a few days )

Anyway, I am too busy to dive into the collada exporter and the file specification. Someone else needs to do this, sorry!

[Grandmaster B]

The animation system in DeleD is currently very basic. Doing more complex animations and skeletons is very hard. What do you need it for?

[Stiglr]

Fortunately, my needs are very basic!

I need rotations and translations/offsets for 90% of what I'm doing. That is, moving flight surfaces like ailerons, rudders, and flaps and some more complex animation sequences for landing gears, canards, etc. These need to be able to have parent/child relationships preserved (so, for example, an aileron hinges along the trailing edge of a wing part), and time/space editable parameters (so that I can assign an elevator to move as it did historically, say for example, at 20 degrees rotated up and -25 rotated down as the full throw of the control stick).

Bones and morphing stuff would be great "cherries on top", but I don't HAVE TO have that immediately.

But hinged rotations and editable translations, yes, those are at a minimum. And all these bits of data would need to be exportable via Collada.
_________________
Targetware contributor and overseer of Target:Corregidor
Windows XP Professional
Athlon 1700+ 1.4GHz
Mobo: FIC AU13 TFA42 BIOS
Allegro sound card
2GB of 2700 DDR memory
Video Card: EVGA 6200 512MB with 6.14.11.8208 drivers
Cougar HOTAS
CH Pedals

[Grandmaster B]

Is Collada your only option?

I believe it still takes at least a few month until we see some progress on this. I currently dont see anybody available to work on this. I'm working on a Yafaray render plugin and playing with the lightmapping.

Im still not sure if the animation system of DeleD fits your needs best. Maybe you need to displace the origin of the objects which is always the center of the model in DeleD.

I may help you set-up the models in Blender for exporting the animations correctly for this purpose.

[Paul-Jan]

I think you might be wrong. The whole idea is that external developers will pick this up (who are currently not on the project). We get this particular request (animation support in the collada exporter) a lot, so chances are pretty good a developer might pick this up sooner than "in a few months".

[Stiglr]

[Grandmaster B]

I've once made a racing simulation and there it was mandatory to be able to place the center of mass/geometry by hand. In DeleD the objects do not have a center (or matrix). All geometry is global which can make it rather difficult to do correct mechanical simulations even if the center is recalculated to be the center of the bounding box, which is sometimes incorrect. Thats why i asked.

So if you just want to rotate objects around a manually choosen hinge you have to fiddle a lot to set the hinge/point of rotation. Bones are a completly different story i'm just wondering what technique you are require or better, what technique the flight sim supports, because you now mentioned Bones as optional features and a offset (as described above) as mandatory. I believe there was a misunderstanding.

Having a matrix, or at least a adjustable axis or center for each object is also a long requested feature.

[chronozphere]

I totally agree. Local coordinate spaces should have a high priority.

When developing a game, It's essential to "know" about the orientations and centers of the objects, so you can manipulate your scene more easily. This was a big problem when I was working on TubeRunner. I managed to work around this by letting the first vertex of the primitive denote it's center. This is a bad and unreliable method.

Unfortunately It's alot of work to add this (At least it seems like that to me). We need to add new GUI controls. We must change various tools (merge for object to name one). Also, we need to have a clear structure in the code to be able to add this (clean up TBasePrimitive).

We need to add this for sure, but we need a good plan and an extra set of hands first.

[Mossie]

I think the needs are:
1. Ability to move the origin of any object to a hinge/pivot point. By selection of origin of object and moving using handles. Would be nice to have dialog box data entry.
2. Enable hinge points, with key frame animation. Would be nice to have dialog box data entry.
3. Enable translation paths, based on origin of object. Would be nice to have dialog box data entry.
4. Enable parent and child relationships on any combination of rotations and translations.
4. Export animations as part of Collada export.

[Stiglr]

Mossie's got it much more succinctly than I could put it.

Use his post as a laundry list.

The reason I say that bones and morphing are "nice to have's" is that they go much further than simple hinge/pivot and spatial translation/offset. They also involve shape/size changes to the objects themselves, as well as changing their positions relative to each other. That's a whole other kettle of fish.
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Targetware contributor and overseer of Target:Corregidor
Windows XP Professional
Athlon 1700+ 1.4GHz
Mobo: FIC AU13 TFA42 BIOS
Allegro sound card
2GB of 2700 DDR memory
Video Card: EVGA 6200 512MB with 6.14.11.8208 drivers
Cougar HOTAS
CH Pedals

[Grandmaster B]

Ok, thanks. I think we now understand.

[chronozphere]

[Grandmaster B]

[AWM Mars]