DTS version 25

#1 ...

#2 Thanks for clearing that up for me.

#3 Morph saves off a snapshot of the mesh every frame, it bloats DTS shapes horribly. You should be able to do everything you need to do with skeletal animation.

#4 ...

#5 That will teach me to reply before reading the linked thread...I will talk to Ben and see if this can get in the next release.

#6 Morph targets are great but until we have some exporter support (at least for a couple common exporters!) there's no good reason to put it into the core code. ("Look! A feature no one can use!")

I think it's a very cool and useful feature but we're currently way loaded with Top Secret Super Cool Projects so this is not our highest priority to fold into the core engine.

If some enterprising souls wanted to do a quality extension of the max or maya exporters to support this, I'd be more than happy to hook them up with some free Torque lovin'. (If there's enough interest here, let me know and I can set up a proper bounty.)

#7 ...

#8 In fact, blender support would be fantastic. But we'd really like to have more than one exporter support it, and preferably at least one of the big-name commercial modelling packages, before we bump it up the priority list.

We really want to avoid a position where the officially supported art pipeline is missing major features on some exporters; if there are at least a couple of options that have the feature then we're much better off than if it's just one.

#9 ...

#10 Absolutely. :) And even having it be a blender-specific resource would be useful for people, I'm sure!

#11 This would be an incredibly valuable resource for people trying to do something similar to what my animator and I are trying to do. Allow me to give a lengthy explanation.:) I'm currently trying to make a 2D platformer with the Torque2D engine. T2D has support for traditional animation, but high quality animations can take up a ton of memory. We would need several 2048x2048 pixel sprite sheets to accomplish what we're trying to do. T2D also has support for displaying animated dts models rather than animated sprites. This allows us to have extremely high quality 2D animations with little memory use.
If we were trying to animate animals or humans that moved realistically, there wouldn't be a problem. In that case, we could basically just do skeletal animation with a bunch of flat planes attached to bones. We're not doing that. We're trying to animate very rubbery and oddly shaped characters that don't have any good way of being animated using a set of bones. (We've tried using bones, but it was much harder to animate and it looked pretty terrible in comparison to our vertex animation tests). So ultimately what we're trying to do is animate the vertices of a subdivided plane. The only exporter that supports this, that I'm aware of, is the 3DSMX exporter. We would rather use Blender and the more efficient DTS v25 format.

So, I think this feature would be particularly useful to people using T2D.

#12 Even with bone scaling, you can't acheive what you want? (There's definitely stuff that morph targets are way better for; just want to make sure you've hit that possibility as well. :)

#13 We've tried that, our skeleton structures either end up being too cumbersome to use or they don't provide enough control to achieve the effect we need.