Subject: Re: Bones, Imagine and LW 
Date: Wed, 18 May 94 16:56:01 EDT
From: Mark Thompson <mark@westford.ccur.com>

w.graham6@genie.geis.com writes:
> Does LW allow for the bones set
> up, along with all of it's various poses, to be saved with the object?

When saving an object in LW, only its static attributes are saved with it,
ie. color, textures, etc. Things that involve time domain such as morphing,
fades, bones, displacement mapping, etc. are saved as part of the ascii
scene file. So if you whish to develop a skeletal structure for an object
that would be loaded whenever that object where used, you would create it
and save the scene. Then instead of doing a load object, you do a load object
from scene instead (which brings in all the time domain stuff with it).

> with it's "radius" implementation of assigning polys to bones, how do you
> combine polymorphic animation with bones movement? What if you, in the course
> of morphing, move the adjacent polys out of the range of the defined radius?

Keep in mind that LW bones have a gaussian rolloff of influence and not a
fixed radius unless specifically setup that way. But I have yet to come across
an application where the situation you describe has become a problem.

> In Imagine, you can go into Pick Point mode and alter the geometry of a
> certain area of polys, such as making a characters skin wrinkle, and define
> a State for that, that also coincides with Bones movement. Does LW have an
> equivalent capability?

This can be done in LW as well, but the methodology is different as there
are no "states" like in Imagine. Basically...wrinkle the skin, save the object
as a morph target, setup your bones, create keys for the bones, then key up
the morph to coincide with the appropriate bone keys. And since the bone
motion is a much greater inflence than the morph (which is typically the
case), the situation described above does not become a problem.
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