4.10.8.2 The Animated Mesh Tools

Several tools are shipped with Crystal Space in order to help the setup of Animeshes and their animations.

Converting from a Genmesh mesh

A Genmesh can be converted into an Animesh, the new Animesh won't simply have any skeleton, morph target or animation.

This is made using the CS::Mesh::AnimatedMeshTools::ImportGeneralMesh() method.

Merging a split mesh

Depending on your artistic pipeline, you may result in an Animesh defined in a main file, while the morph targets of the Animesh are defined each of them in a different, separate file. The ‘splitmorph’ plugin tool allows to load all these files, and to merge them into a single Animesh mesh.

The ‘splitmorph’ plugin tool uses the methods CS::Mesh::AnimatedMeshTools::ImportGeneralMesh() and CS::Mesh::AnimatedMeshTools::ImportGeneralMesh(), and parses the parameters of the tool from a Crystal Space library file.

An example of merging of a split mesh is available in the main Crystal Space repository, using a face generated by the FaceGen software. Please read the ‘readme’ file in ‘CS/data/jane’ to proceed to the download of the file, then you will be able to visualize it with the following command:

viewmesh data/jane/jane.cslib

Loading motion capture animation data

A motion capture parser (class CS::Animation::BVHMocapParser) is available for the loading of animations defined in the BVH (Biovision Hierarchical data) file format. It can be used to feed the animation data to be played by a CS::Animation::iSkeletonAnimationNode animation node.

This parser can be combined with a ‘Retarget’ animation node in order to redirect the animation to an Animesh with a roughly different skeleton.

Motion capture viewer and Point Light Display system

A viewer (‘csmocapviewer’) allows to visualize easily the content of BVH motion capture files, as well as the retargeting of the animation data to a given Animesh.

The viewer is also shipped with a Point Light Display system, that has been designed to be used in psychology studies on the human perception of biological motion. It uses a Perlin noise to add points with random motion.

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