Maya Exporter

hi
this time i talked about the maya exporter i wrote so i could defines whatever i want where i want and the why i want, without sticking to id md5 format.
when you want to create maya exporter you have few options:
1. create plugin dll
2. create exe application and call maya functions
3. create mel script
i choose option 2 because it more easy to debug and doesn't need your maya run everytime you want to export and test something, the drawback is the you don't go to file menu in maya, select export and see your new format.
option 3 is also good if you know mel script, but doesn't allow you to access everything in maya, and i don't think you have tools to debug it like in dev studio.
anyway, the new format called OGE, this format designed to support both static and dynamic models.
the structure of this format looks like this:
MESH
mesh_info - vertices count, texcoords count, normal count, weight_count (if animated), faces etc...
material_info - the name to material defined in .mtr script
mesh_data - vertices, normals, texcoords, indices etc...
anim_data - weights, skeleton data

global for all meshes
anim_data - anim sets count, fps of each set, joints animated and their anim data

the reason anim_data is shared between all meshes is because each mesh could have different influence on specific joints and those have it own skinCluster, because i don't want to manage and control animation controller per skinCluster, i'm merging those skinCluster's data into one skinCluster data and export it as it was single skin for the whole model meshes.
each of those data is optional and could be selected from the exporter ui.
here i a screenshot of the exporter:

options:
1. convert from right to left handed (maya uses right handed, engine uses left handed)
2. convert from Y up to Z up (engine uses z up)
3. export position, normals, texture coordinates (possible to invert v coord)
4. export materials
5. export animations, possible to set animation name
6. at right i have meshes list, this list allows me to export only the meshes i select. skinned meshes will be shown with '(skinned)' keyword after their name.

the reason i have the option to overwrite animation name is that i can use the exporter to create animation files (containing only animation data without geometry data).
the model could be created at first with one idle animation (or without animation at all), and at later point i can add more animations to it.
also, if you have few characters with same skeleton, you don't want to duplicate all animations, you just want to have shared animation folder containing all animation files for those characters.

New Animation System

hi
its been more than a month since i updated this blog, the reason is that i just didn't save time for taking screenshots/create a video and update the blog.
so here i'm finding few minutes to write about the new things i implemented, hopefully updating with screenshots/videos on the next post ;)
list of things i'v working on:
1. new animation system
2. abandon md5 file format and use internal format (writting exporter from maya)
3. real-time atmospheric scattering
4. HDR
5. read shaderx6 :)

the first thing i wanted to rewrite for along time is the animation system, calling it animation system is a nice joke, but still it could play different animations for different parts of the model, do some kind of blending and at the time it was enough.
but the time is come and i wanted more advanced system which allows me control and create animation on the fly, adding sse and such...
the new animation system based on blend trees, what it means is that you can apply operations/operators on trees and get a new tree as a result.
the system designed so the operators works just like in math, you apply operator get a result and apply another operator on it and so on...
so how this is going to help with animation?
when doing skinned animation, you need few things:
a. model with weights
b. bind pose skeleton
c. animation data for that bind pose skeleton
this skeleton form a tree, so you can define the operations in term of animation and you are set.
you can thing of animation as a list of skeletons which defines new position & orientation for this skeleton or just list of that skeleton with different poses.
the operations i'm using is:
a. subtract tree A from tree B - useful for separating certain parts from specific animation, for example: you have walk animation which moves both hands and legs, but you want to separate it to two new animations one that moves on the legs and another for moving the hands.

b. multiple tree A with tree B - useful for merging two trees to form merged animation, for example: merging the two animation created in a and get the original animation (the one which moves both hands and legs)

c. transition from tree A to tree B - the is by far the most useful operation, this create a transition from one animation to another by setting transition/blend factor [0..1], what this means is for blend factor 0 tree A will be the returned, 1 tree B will be returned, for 0.5 for example a tree between A and B will be returned. so why is it so useful? well imagine you have a character that have walk,run animations and you want to play walk animation for velocity under 10 and run over 50, but what happens between 10 and 50? well you can use the velocity to compute blend factor to be used to create smooth transition between walk and run and run to walk.

when setting animation is just a matter of setting list of skeletons, but when implementing you don't want to switch from one skeleton to another in one frame, what you want is to create smooth transition between one skeleton to another, for example: skeleton from frame 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4 and so on... the result is a skeleton inbetween old frame skeleton and current frame skeleton, this skeleton used as input to other operations.
also, the animation system works hand by hand with the new engine format 'oge', used for both static and animated models, this format created using the new exporter i wrote.
next time i will write about the other things i worked on...
cya