Skeletal animation

[myk45]

Hello all!

I saw there many games on phones these days that have animations with avatars(i.e people running, zombies walking) and that sort of animation. I was wondering if these were sprite based animations or are they actually doing some skeletal animation with 3D models? If yes, wouldn't that be quite heavy to do on a phone?

Any info regarding this would be helpful.
Thanks a lot!

[dagoro]

Hi myk45,
I'm not sure which games you're referring to, but they almost certainly used skinned meshes.

As you probably know, sprites need a new image for each frame of animation and every possible angle, this requiring a ton of memory and limiting your flexibility.

Skinning on a phone isn't as expensive as you think since it can be done in the GPU with OpenGL ES 2.0 vertex shaders. There's a skinning training course (http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/sdkdownloads/index.asp) in the Imagination Technologies SDK. This should work on mobile devices and PC emulation.

Good luck!

[myk45]

Hi myk45,
I'm not sure which games you're referring to, but they almost certainly used skinned meshes.

As you probably know, sprites need a new image for each frame of animation and every possible angle, this requiring a ton of memory and limiting your flexibility.

Skinning on a phone isn't as expensive as you think since it can be done in the GPU with OpenGL ES 2.0 vertex shaders. There's a skinning training course (http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/sdkdownloads/index.asp) in the Imagination Technologies SDK. This should work on mobile devices and PC emulation.

Good luck!

Thanks for the link Dagoro!