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Animated DTS files under TSE

by Florian Ross · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 07/04/2005 (3:34 am) · 2 replies

Hi,

I have a few thoughts about Dynamic Meshes and its implementation into TSE.

AFAIK TSE uses the same technique as TGE.

The Mesh is kept in System Memory, animated there and then sent to the Video Card.
This is "rather" slow because the Engine needs to send Vertex Data over to the Card for every animation cycle.

Wouldnt it be alot faster to Store Dynamic Meshes in a "Vertex Buffer" and animate them via vertex shaders?

This would work perfectly for bone-animations but vertex animations could benefit from it too (it just uses more space in video memory).

EDIT: Where to ask questions about manipulating a loaded dts file? like removing vertices and faces and adding different faces and vertices with Weights for bones, etc.
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Torque Owner Brian Ramage
Black Jacket Games
#1
07/05/2005 (6:16 pm)
It can be faster (but not always) to animate skinned characters using vertex shaders. We don't in TSE because a) it takes a LOT of constant registers even on SM 2.0, and therfore b) isn't very compatible with SM 1.1 cards. c) It limits the animation quality as many apps that do this allow a limited amount of weighting per vertex. d) There are a limited amount of bones per vertex that can be used. e) The vertex shaders can become massive in size, and therefore running pretty slow if you have a lot of verts in your skinned model.

Skinning might be a good application to do on CPU hardware with multiple cores if there are a ton of skinned vertices. Next-gen consoles might do this for fighting games for instance, where you might be able to have a couple of characters showing with 20,000 - 50,000 polys a piece.

Torque 3D Owner Florian Ross
#2
07/06/2005 (12:56 am)
I see, thanks for the response :)