Hi,
I created a character in my game and animate it using bone animation. The ways that I usually do for bone animation are,
1. Create a bones skeleton of the character. These bones will be mainly used for animation.
2. Then, I attached the skin of the character to the each bone. Each skin will be a separate mesh, i.e. head, hand, foot, body, etc.
Since my Panda .X exporter doesn't work correctly when I export the model with animation, i.e. it seems like all the skin are scattering all over the screen. So, I decided to attach the skins to the bones manually in DBpro.
I found that there is two ways to deal with this:
1. Using ADD LIMB, OFFSET LIMB and LINK LIMB. By using this way, I need to add the limb, and link it in such way that the bone will be the parent of its skin.
2. Using ADD OBJECT TO LIMB, such that the object will be the skin, and the limb will be the bone.
I had chosen the second approach since all the skins have diffuse map and bump map. If I use the first way, I have no way to bump map a limb. (or is there any way that I don't know?)
My question is, will there be any performance differences between the first and the second approach?
I got a feeling that the second approach might slow down the performance, since the 3D engine have to keep track of the position and the orientation of the limb every time, and update the glued object accordingly. Whereas for the first approach, the newly added limb is already part of the scene graph of the object, so it will be handed more optimally by DBpro (or Direct3D).
I know this is a very long question, but this decision is important to me.
Thanks everyone for the patience and help!
Bad Nose Entertainment - Where games are forged from the flames of talent and passion.
http://www.badnose.com/
