Can anyone provide any guidance on modern day techniques for supporting mesh animations?
I’ve read lots of summaries of different techniques… but the date stamps on the write ups and the underlying approach imply they are likely for legacy GL approaches.
thanks
j.
Skeletal animation is probably the most versatile and popular. Essentially you have a set of “bones” which are defined by a transformation. Each vertex has weightings to one or more of these bones and they are transformed according to their weightings. That’s the idea but be wary that the implementation is a little more complex.
Nothing dramatic has happened here since vertex shaders came around in OGL2. You don’t have to do the skinning on the CPU anymore. In OGL2 you could upload your bones into a [icode]uniform mat4[64] array[/icode] or something like that to get access to it. In OGL3+ you can upload as many skeletons as you want to a single buffer using a (supposedly) faster glMapBufferRange() call and then access it from your vertex shader as a texture buffer object. That means that you can do instancing and skinning at the same time, which is pretty neat.
theagentd / quew8 - thanks for the amazing info. I have lots to research now !
this is exactly the sort of tip i was hoping for.
j.