Horde3D

Can Horde3D be made to support more than 4 weights per skinned vertex, maybe in software skinning mode ? Collada does export the skinning info...
Thanks in advance
Sanjit

Basically yes but that means the geo format and hardware skinning setup get more complicated. Currently the weights are reduced to the 4 largest ones in ColladaConv and renormalized. In most cases 4 weights should be enough, is there a special reason that you need more?

Thanks marciano.
I intend to use Horde3D in a 3D animation application which uses facial rigs from Softimage/FaceRobot. Basically these high quality rigs have lots of bones to achieve a "soft tissue" effect rather than the usual stiff skinning we see if we have 4 or less bone influences per vertex. For example the bones skinning the mouth area will also affect the eyebrows and ears during a smile... Yes, from a gaming standpoint 4 is fine but for realistic facial expressions we will need more. Morphing is an option but most of the models we will have to work with will be skinned. I have used NVidia's Scenix which supports 32 influences per vertex and the results were impressive but the Scenix library is not that great for animation - Horde3D is far better OK, so I need to modify the ColladaConv tool and the update Model code?

Sanjit

Ok, for high-quality animation especially for faces it makes definitely sense to have more weights.

It shouldn't be difficult to get more weights into the engine and using them for software skinning. They get already parsed in ColladaConv and processed in converter.cpp. What needs to be done is writing all of them out and loading them in the core geo loader and then finally apply them during software skinning.

OK ! Will have a go at it !
Thanks for the help!