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Hi, so I've been using dark shader, and I need to make a 3d model of the earth for my game's main menu. I want to use the "bumpbone" one, but I can't seem to make a "boned, weighted model". I have no idea what weighted means, and whenever I try to set up a bone in lithunwrap, it doesen't save the bones even though direct x supports bones. Help please!

Btw I use wings 3d for modeling and lithunwrap as well. I'd rather not buy anything to get this to work.

weighting is essentially assigning a section of the model to a bone, the more a piece of a model is weighted toward a bone the more influence that bone has over the manipulation of the model, for instance if you're weighting an arm the bone for the forearm would have influence over that section of the model by weighting the faces/ verts that corispond with that area to that bone. Its asking you to weight the model to that corrisponding bone so that it acctually is affecting the model, I've never used dark shader however, and linthunwrap is a dedicated uv mapping tool is it not? so therefore i'd of thought that it wouldnt be able to assign bones to sections of the model, I could be wrong as I havent used the program in years but when I last used it it was exclusively used for uv mapping. hope this helped, also if you're not able to get these to work with your respective programs you may want to try out blender, very powerful program.

So I've been trying to add bones in blender, and the directx export on blender seems to really suck. I'm going to try to get someone who knows their shaders to help me mod the bumbbone one to not require bones, since that would really be the best thing anyway.

its very strange for a shader to require a boned and weighted model, the shader just determines how the model is displayed on screen and it shouldnt require a bone of any sort to do that, as i said before i havent used the program so i could be completely wrong but that doesnt seem right to me, are you sure its not something else causing the request to weight the model?

Try character FX to build and export bone based meshs (its free):
http://www.insanesoftware.de/index.php?page=home.php




Actual it is not, fastbone.fx in FPSC is a very good example of animation processes being done by the Gpu instead of the Cpu with the help of the vertex shader. The shader bumpbone.fx can do the exact same process, however shader allows for bump and specular surfacing. But I do agree most shaders seem to overuse the pixel shader and do very little with the vertex half.

Edit: forgot to explain why shader creators prefer bone bases animations over vertex. If you were for example modelling a human character/model regardless of the polygon count the bone count will remain the same, allowing for complex models with minimum processing time, compared to per vertex where there are 3 vertexes per polygon, your animation will be limited by your polygon count since it would take longer time to process.

Most games prefer to use a mixture of bone based animation for the body (excluding the head) for body movement and vertex animation for the head for facial expression and speech.