realtime animation

"break modifier" type warp for Kineme3D

I was looking at this blog about a fellow who wrote what he calls a "break" modifier for warping single collada meshes in Papervision 3D.

The gist of it is that they can be placed at various points on an object, and from that point, rotation can apply to a selected group of vertices. So, a break modifier can be placed at a knee, and then the lower leg can be made to move back and forth. In this blog, the guy talks about placing a modifier at each hip, and a modifier at each knee, then making a pair of jeans look like it's walking.

This is fairly similar to the bend box... except a bend box works over an entire mesh and doesn't bend stuff quite in the same way.

I thought this was a pretty cool concept/cheat way of doing character animation that might be quicker/faster than integrating full on skeletal animation into QC. Maybe something like a Bend Box, where you could configure coordinates that something should "break/rotate" at in x/y/z, then have controls for x/y/z rotation of the part that should be rotated, and a boolean for whether the part "above" or "below" the break point would get the rotation. Then, the patch could be configured in settings to add more break points.

Just a thought as to how something like that could work reasonably... I wonder if anyone else thinks it would be as cool as me? There are loads of single mesh people models available.

http://www.everydayflash.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/09/making-things-wal...