Morph animations in TSE

#1 It's probably just a missed part of the 3space port. Have you tried tracing the rendering and making sure that nothing crucial is commented out? Sometimes it's very trivial to re-enable these things. :)

#2 Hi Ben,

in tsShapeInstance (and tsMesh) i found some morph code that is commented out. I'm unable to port this from TGE to TSE because i don't know DirectX and can't handle this VertexBuffer stuff. I've tried to port it by looking through the whole engine code, using the vertexBuffers like they are used in other classes, but failed. So i wrote this post :)

I've read that there could be a TSE Update soon. Perhaps morphing will be supported with this update?

#3 I'll mention it to Brian. We do definitely plan on supporting the full 3space feature set. Does anyone else need/want this functionality? It tends to be deprecated as it takes tons of resources, but if there's a widespread need it'll get put much higher on the priority list!

#4 Morphing would be fine, but for now, we will use animations with transformations instead of morphing.

Thanks for your help!

#5 I would greatly prefer morphing between morph targets (there was a resource submitted for TGE on this) rather than keyframing each vert position over the animation. This would expand the animation capabilities (esp facial animations) greatly although it requires a recompile and creation of new exporters to handle the data.

I am not very interested in the full morph animation due to the resource requirements, though.

Thanks for asking!

#6 I suppose I will post this here rather than start a new thread.

We have some very simple objects that use morph animations to grow and shrink. We are able to get the morphing to work in TGE, but I am unable to figure out why they aren't working in TSE. I see that TSMesh::morphVB is commented out in tsMesh.cpp, but from what I can tell that isn't even called in TGE anyway. At least my breakpoints never get hit in TGE. I also see the mMorphable bool in tsShapeInstance is never getting set in TSE, but it also is not set in TGE for me when I have an object that does morph. I have also tried to look at the render functions for TSShapeInstance and the like and don't see anything that is different that would make it not work.

Does anyone have any pointers on where to look for what has changed that would make morph animations not work? I can't seem to find a good starting point to figuring this out, and any help would be appreciated.

#7 Any news on whether the morph capability is being worked on for TSE or if dtsmorphversioncode is being ported over, and the corresponding exporters for maya and 3dmax? I am very interested in both of these capabilities.

#8 We've discussed it internally and have decided to stop supporting morph animations. They are really inefficient, especially regarding vertex storage, and most of what can be done with morph animations can be done with skinning or animated transforms.

#9 You can perform morphing using shaders, you should look into it.

#10 *bump*

Guys. Is this still the case? Are you not supporting morph animations anymore? All our flags and pennants for the ships in our game are set up this way. We've ported to TGEA and they no longer work.

#11 Harvey,

yes, it was functionality that we eventually plan to address in a way that is more robust. The morphs were horribly inefficient, and you can mostly get the same effects using bones or other methods.

send me an email about this at joem@garagegames.com and I can offer up some options for different ways to get the same effects with bones and or other deformation approaches.

if you can describe how you are setting up these, it will be easier for me to understand what the end result is and find a quick solution for this.

Joe