Horde3D

Can be found over at the wiki:

http://www.horde3d.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Tips_and_Techniques

If you have any new suggestions, please update the wiki directly, or post here and I can add it for you.

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Let's bring 'em out! Any old iron! Any old iron!
A door opens and a homewife brings out a rather sophisticated-looking ground-to-air missile system, and dumps it on the cart.
Thank you.

i think this belongs in the wiki

I agree, although I had no problem with making the topic sticky ( maybe some things have to be discussed so this thread can be used for it )

Wiki updated.

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Let's bring 'em out! Any old iron! Any old iron!
A door opens and a homewife brings out a rather sophisticated-looking ground-to-air missile system, and dumps it on the cart.
Thank you.

Hello all,

I'm currently testing out Horde3D for some real-time rendering tests and for educational purposes, as I want to learn how to manipulate a programmable graphics pipeline and it seems this engine is the easiest to get started with due to its data-driven approach of using XML. Where I am currently very skilled at is modelling/animating with maya so I am also very impressed with the animation system of horde3d and seems to match modern animation system seen in the latest games with having vertex shaders driving the skinning for speed, bone animation blending and morph targets, so my first experiments would be to test animation with the latest real-time rendering techniques.

What I'm wondering though is how morph targets are calculated in H3D, are they in CPU or shader-driven? For efficiency strategies, if I were to only make morph targets in selected parts of the geometry like the head/face, would I need to split the geometry so that the head is separate to the body or could I make the morphs only have head data (while keeping the exact vert count in the head matching the original model) so I could just keep the head+body as one single skinned mesh but save memory by not storing morph changes in parts which have no change? Some clarity in this would really benefit the asset creation wiki.

I did a test with a model of mine that I'd like to see in realtime, fortunately I made sure to make weighting a max of 4 bone influences per vertex but currently it has well over 75 bones so the shader can't handle it and cut off the legs of the models upon importing into the horde3d editor (109 bones, yikes!) so I am off to replace a lot of bones with morph targets, but I'd like to know some of these details first.

Thanks all and keep up the good work!

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-Alex
Website

I'm not so familiar with all those modelling techniques, but as far as I know the realization within Horde3D, morph targets are calculated on the CPU.

You may also try to use software skinning if you aren't able to reduce the number of bones. If I remember correctly the bone limit is only existent for the hardware skinning, since there are not enough registers on the GPU to have more than 75 bones. Maybe Marciano can answer those questions a bit more detailed.

I don't think you will need to split your mesh for morphs - however give it ago and see what happens. Theirs a demo somewhere showcasing morphs and facial features using drag sliders?

_________________

Let's bring 'em out! Any old iron! Any old iron!
A door opens and a homewife brings out a rather sophisticated-looking ground-to-air missile system, and dumps it on the cart.
Thank you.

As Volker said morph targets are calculated on the CPU. There was some optimization for morph targets but unfortunately it got lost when software skinning was introduced. At the moment all vertices (morphed or not) are uploaded to the GPU when morph weights are changed. This needs to be optimized in the future.


You can use software skinning for such more complex models. Note that the 75 bone limitation is only existing for DX9 cards, DX10 compatible cards have more registers, so a higher number of joints is no longer a problem for them.