[sldev] [HELP] Character/Avatar Engine]

[Mike Monkowski]

Ian Wilson wrote:
> Mike, apologies, I have to be a little vague at this point for a couple 
> of reasons, the project is not yet fully spec'd and the project is for a 
> client so I am not able to mention too much about what is being planned 
> at this stage. But that is a temporary problem.
> 
> To be a little more detailed, we require a skeleton and meshes that can 
> be driven/deformed procedurally. Animations will not be used (or will be 
> blended into the procedural system movements). It is also possible that 
> we require much more detailed models with more joints and more advanced 
> "meshes".
> 
> Initially we will investigate the current system and see how far it can 
> be tweaked but if anyone has already looked at this system (as your 
> detailed knowledge seems to indicate) it could save us a good deal of 
> time and pain.
> 
> Ian

All viewers currently use the same mesh for every avatar.  The 
appearance is changed using morphs.  The server sends a fixed length 
vector of morph values to the client to set the morph amounts.

There's no requirement that you use this information in your viewer if 
you don't mind seeing something other than what everyone else does.  You 
can ignore the animations sent from the server if you don't mind all of 
the avatars moving as rigid figures.

If you want to do procedural animation in your viewer that no one else 
will see, you can do that.  The physics system uses an ellipsoid for 
collisions, not any aspect of the avatar pose, so only the location of 
the avatar is important to the server.

I guess the main point is that you can swap out anything you want in the 
viewer, but only you will see the effects.  No other viewers can be 
informed of what you see.

For example, I am using morphs to do lip sync on the client, but only my 
viewer shows the lips moving.  Of course, I hope to get the lip sync 
into the standard viewer so everyone can use it, but everyone will still 
see their own representation computed locally.

Mike