Thursday, 9 February 2012

I Hate Rigging

As the title says, I really don't like rigging models. I produced exploding poly-soup many many times before finally getting a pose that is... well, crap, but without too much in the way of broken bits. (Edit: Collapsed joints? Totally don't count.)



I also don't like making limbs. Torso and head... well, I can just about cope with them. Ah well, at least Suzanne has been replaced as the test mesh. This one is even amenable to animation, when I fix the topology and terribly broken rig and write an exporter for animation data and the relevant shaders and... and... look, it's not urgent OK?

Annoyingly, I have found whilst doing this that xNormal doesn't cope terribly well with small meshes (defined by it as those with a bounding sphere radius less than 2.0 entirely arbitrary units). I have chosen one length-unit to be approximately one meter, hence all my meshes are prone to dodgy results when fresh from Blender. I got around this by exporting massively scaled up versions for normal and AO map generation, although I'm pretty sure I actually fluffed applying the normal maps...

I suppose something more automated, and possibly entirely sourced from Blender itself, would be preferable anyway.

Other things: entities that bump into each other now perform an attack. This makes the target flash red and removes one hit point... baby steps, baby steps. When an entity dies, it causes each entity on its 'recent attackers' list to gain 1 XP.  Although I cannot think of a good reason to allow Guild Wars-style levelled monsters, it was easier to just implement this in a uniform way, and as there's no level-up mechanic it hardly matters in any case.

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