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Character Rendering Options

by Jared Wheeler · in Torque Game Engine · 11/13/2006 (9:49 am) · 3 replies

Hey, new to the engine and still trying to get my head around it. I'm trying to do the characters in my game in a style similar to South Park or the Guiness "brilliant!" ads, but living in a 3d world. I'm thinking I could define a collection of vertices in 3d space and then pin a billboard on each vertex and rotate and scale it appropriately to make it look right. One for each arm, one for the head, etc... The pieces should always face the z-axis (like billboards).

I've been poking around the engine and am starting to get a feel for how things fit together in a high-level sense, but I'm just not sure where to even start with this. Is it as simple as writing a single class that pulls together the other appropriate classes, or will I need to recreate some of the fundamental classes within TGE to fit my needs? Any info you guys have about the guts of the TGE rendering engine, specifically a model of how it processes vertex data would be fantastic.

Thanks!
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    Torque 3D Owner mb
    #1
    11/13/2006 (11:26 am)
    One possible way might be to make a flat box/poly in 3d and use an animated texture on it (IFL: Image file list) with an alpha channel. I dunno if this is good idea or not as i'm new too but seems doable. Or just make it all in 3d, and use regular animations.

    I dont think you'll need to write any class for this..

    Torque Owner Jared Wheeler
    #2
    11/13/2006 (12:45 pm)
    Yeah, I'm not trying to do animations that play on one flat polygon, though. I'm trying to create fully articulated characters that use 3d vertices to position their 2d billboard elements. I want to be able to animate the vertices themselves.

    Torque 3D Owner mb
    #3
    11/13/2006 (12:50 pm)
    You can make an object in your 3d program and assign mount points. You might be able to use shapebaseimagedata to do the arms, legs etc.. and mount them to your main object. I'm not quite sure I understand how you want it to work. you can define animations for each.

    but i dont understand why you cant just use one 3d object and animate it, then call each animation as needed.