7 replies to this topic

[MishaParem]

Hi everyone, recently I realized that I want to do some 3d game programming, and I decided I'm going to use the OpenGL API. I did a search on the web for some tutorials, and I found good basic ones, (draw a triangle, color it, apply textures etc..) but now I want something a bit more complex. I saw a nice set of tutorials on the APRON TUTORIALS website, but the actuall tutorials are gone, and there's no source code. The idea was

1) animate a 3d stick skeleton
2) animate a 3d character

Does anyone know any other websites or books where I can find such tutorials?

[Reedbeta]

Check out http://nehe.gamedev.net (look at the tutorials and articles linked from the left hand navbar). They are very incremental and go from basics (the VERY basics, you can probably skip the first 5 or 10) all the way up to relatively advanced techniques.

[Guard--an]

nehe tutorials will teach you the opengl basics
then you might consider having a look to the animadead or cal3d character animation libraries

also there are numerous biped (motion capture format) viewers

cheers,
Guard][an

[MishaParem]

I've already looked at the NeHe tutorials, those are great for starters, but not exactly what I want to do atm.

'Guard said:

[an']nehe tutorials will teach you the opengl basics
then you might consider having a look to the animadead or cal3d character animation libraries

also there are numerous biped (motion capture format) viewers

cheers,
Guard][an

I HAVE read about animadead but I was unable to find decent tutorials for it, any ideas/links where I might find some?

I haven't heard of cal3d before.

[TheNut]

http://www.flipcode....ts/charfaq.html

This was the only article I ever read on how to do skeletal animation. After this I implemented the MS3D file format (milkshape) to finish the task.

[Kenneth Gorking]

Discreet had some tutorial software for exporting and rendering 3d animated meshes called DejaView, don't know where it is though... Google it...

[g(h)eerko]

Depends on how u want to do it.

If u want to code from scratch and acheive skeletal animation, u need to know about, openGL matrix stack, homogeneous coordinates transformations, how to deal with multiple coordinate frame of reference, open chain kinematics, denavit-hartenberg representations.Tis is a longer route, but u will get to know exactly what u r doing.

The short cut is to deal with abstractions , u can use cal3d or any other animators like md2.

[johnb003]

I'm working on Animadead right now. The next release should be faily soon I hope. And there are 12 tutorial demos in the next version that walk you through using the library from the simplest features to the most comlpex. The next version even comes with example shaders you can use.

The biggest problem with Animadead so far has been lack of support for other modeling packages, so what I'm working on right now is an Animadead Format Writer library. It has API calls to specify the data in a generic way, and then compiles the data and writes it in the Animadead format.

I'll be including an exporter for 3DS MAX as well in the next release, and hopefully with this new library it will be much easier for people to make contributions with exporters for other packages.

As for right now though, the best way to learn Animadead is to look at the example programs, and take a look at the class hierarchy online.

There's contact info on the page, and if you have any questions using Animadead, I'll be happy to help.

Thanks,
`John