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<H2> 2.9 Skeletal Animation </H2>
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<P>
Skeletal animation is a process of animating a mesh by moving a set of hierarchical bones within the mesh, which in turn moves the vertices of the model according to the bone assignments stored in each vertex. An alternative term for this approach is 'skinning'. The usual way of creating these animations is with a modelling tool such as Milkshape 3D, Blender, 3D Studio or Maya. OGRE provides exporters to allow you to get the data out of these modellers and into the engine See section <A HREF="manual_34.html#SEC145">4.1 Exporters</A>.<BR><BR>
</P><P>
There are many grades of skeletal animation, and not all engines (or modellers for that matter) support all of them. OGRE supports the following features:
<UL>
<LI>Each mesh can be linked to a single skeleton
<LI>Unlimited bones per skeleton
<LI>Hierarchical forward-kinematics on bones
<LI>Multiple named animations per skeleton (e.g. 'Walk', 'Run', 'Jump', 'Shoot' etc)
<LI>Unlimited keyframes per animation
<LI>Linear or spline-based interpolation between keyframes
<LI>A vertex can be assigned to multiple bones and assigned weightings for smoother skinning
<LI>Multiple animations can be applied to a mesh at the same time, again with a blend weighting
</UL>
<BR>
Skeletons and the animations which go with them are held in .skeleton files, which are produced by the OGRE exporters. These files are loaded automatically when you create an Entity based on a Mesh which is linked to the skeleton in question. The entity is then given an 'animation state' object per animation on the skeleton to allow you to specify the animation state of that single entity (you can animate multiple entities using the same skeleton, OGRE sorts the reuse out internally).<BR><BR>
<P>
You can retrieve a pointer to the AnimationState object by calling Entity::getAnimationState. You can then call methods on this returned object to update the animation, probably in the frameStarted event. AnimationState has a very simple method 'addTime' which allows you to alter the animation position incrementally, and it will automatically loop for you. addTime can take positive or negative values (so you can reverse the animation if you want).<BR><BR>
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