Adding Animated Meshes

Hello,

I am a little confused by the way Blitz3D handles anim meshes.

I understand that loading meshes with the "loadAnimMesh" command copies over animation and hierarchy data, but what is confusing me is when I use this in combination with the Add Mesh command.

I wish to combine several animated meshes into one animated object. That is to say, I want to make 1 entity represent 5 or more actual meshes rather than add 5 animation sequences to the 1 mesh.

However when I use the Add Mesh command it only copies the mesh data itself, and not the animation and hierarchy information. Leaving my new multi-mesh entity as static and lifeless :/

Do I have to reconstruct the animation manually? Or must I use the LoadAnimMesh command and specify a parent (which takes a long time for the program to start).

What i'm really after is an "AddAnimMesh" command ! ;) Is there a way to do this please?

I'm not sure if I'm understanding you right. Do you want to combine five animated meshes into one animated mesh with all five sets of animations? If so, LoadAnimSeq() sounds like what you need. Load the first model with LoadAnimMesh() and then LoadAnimSeq() the remaining four to add the animations to the original model.

Or do you mean you want five separate animated models to all share the same surface? Because I'm not sure you can do that.

I want five seperate animated models. Actually I want considerably more than 5 to be honest! With very good technical reason too - they all share the same texture and I want to only send the texture information through the pipeline just the once.

Comparing the speed of sending un-animated versions of my mesh through as seperate entities and as a combined entity in this manner is a huge boost to speed, but without the animation it just isn't going to work.

Hi Andy

I've been down this road before a few months back. Addmesh only adds the basic non-animated mesh, it doesn't add additional bones and reindex the vertex assignments (but jeez, that would be nice if it did). If you want to have five separate animated models you'll have to come up with a Populator utility that will take an animated mesh, and build five copies (with separate animation points) and save it as a .b3d file.

I've given this approach away and now I'm looking at straight mesh animation.

Sorry for the bad news, cheers

GrumpyOldMan