cal3d

[mirv]

Just a little curious as to if anyone has used cal3d before? I'm thinking of giving it a go just to see how many models it will handle concurrently, so will probably do up a quick test in the next couple of weeks (homework first, this second).

If anyone else can offer any other animation library, I'll test them as well.

[DrEvil]

A little late in response, but we use cal3d for commercial products at me place of work. I actually integrated it into our engine using 4 way blending on the legs(blending forward, backward, strafeleft, straferight based on the velocity and direction of facing), as well as a 3 way upper body blend(blending between looking ahead, looking up and looking down based on the aim pitch). Much of the implementation was from studying HL2. Also allowed stationary targets about a +-30 degree field they can look around that there lower body stays stationary and upper body rotates at the waist.

It supports hardware accelerating the animations via vertex shader and stuff, and in our experiences was easily capable of handling a good number of guys on screen at once. We haven't yet played with the lod or morph target features.

[mirv]

Cool, I'll keep working with it then, thanks for the info. Seems quite nice, I just got a quick little model up & running (speed-walking is more appropriate I guess) in one of the mini-viewers, so I'll go plugging away with SDL to see just how many I can pump out to the screen, and give it increasingly complex animations to deal with.

[mirv]

Finally got multiple instances of a single model walking around - it started to go a bit slow when it hit over 96, but had it still running at 512 (at about 9fps, give or take a little), but that was mainly due to some ineffecient methods of obtaining specific vertex data (having to copy it all every single frame, looking into how to have direct access to the data atm), and that the model is about 4700 polys.
Will poke at it further...

[DrEvil]

Are you using the CalHardwareModel or just CalModel? We use CalHardwareModel, offload pretty much everything to the GPU, animated via vertex shader.

[mirv]

Normal CalModel for the moment, but I'd seen the hardware version floating about, was going to look at it soon. Thanks for the tip!

[johnb003]

I wrote a much less widely known Skeletal Animation Library called Animadead.

The code is much easier to follow and it's designed to get direct access to the data. So give it a try and tell me what you think. http://animadead.sf.net

Also, I've been doing a lot of work on this recently and so there will be a new version shortly. In fact right now the maya exporter is the only one I've released. I'll release my 3ds max exporter in the next few weeks as well as examples that use vertex shaders.

Oh, speaking of which ... you really ought to wait for my next release, I updated the data structure slightly to make it more efficient for vertex buffer objects.

Anyway you can check it out 2.0 for now.

[mirv]

cool, thanks.
I'll look into soon, though I'll have to wait for the 3ds max exporter to use my own models. The urge to code slackened off this last week, but is building once more...

[mirv]

some cygwin compile problems with animadead, undefined reference to gl or glu stuff mainly. Cygwin likes -lopengl32 and -lglu32 instead of -lGL and -lGLU, so I'll either manually edit the makefiles, or just reboot to Linux later.