[x3d-public] Purpose of X3Dng -- Animation

Michalis Kamburelis michalis.kambi at gmail.com
Thu Oct 20 22:34:58 PDT 2016


2016-10-21 6:23 GMT+02:00 Leonard Daly <Leonard.Daly at realism.com>:
> In all your writings you appear to be making the assumption that joint-based
> animation with deformable skin is H-Anim. That is not true.

Hi,

>From my point of view, I see H-Anim as "the way to do animation using
skeletons, bones and (optional) skins in X3D". I can easily do
skeletal animation of anything (humans, pipes, animals) with H-Anim. I
actually implemented it in view3dscene, and really there's nothing
limiting this system to "humanoids". You just transform the bones, and
optionally deform a mesh following the per-vertex weights.

Maybe we could solve the issues raised here by simply changing the
wording (and some node names), to de-emphasize the "humanoid" part in
the H-Anim specifications. (The X3D component
http://www.web3d.org/documents/specifications/19775-1/V3.3/Part01/components/hanim.html
and the H-Anim spec on
http://h-anim.org/Specifications/H-Anim200x/ISO_IEC_FCD_19774/ ).

Such change would more accurately reflect H-Anim's capabilities (in my view).

How about we would simply rename H-Anim component in X3D to "Skeletal
Animation"? Some additional renames would be nice, like removing the
"HAnim*" prefix from nodes, and the main "HAnimHumanoid" node could be
something simpler like just a "Skeleton" (with the primary field being
"skeleton").

The fact that the H-Anim standard defines also a standard "Structure
of a humanoid" is just "an extra" for me. I mean, it is valuable!, but
it can also be simply ignored if you don't model a humanoid (or don't
care about standardizing your names, to transfer the animations
between other humanoids).

Also, adding such "Skeletal Animation" component to the "Immersive"
(or even earlier) profile would be a nice touch. It is a major
animation method. Putting it inside a component other than "Full" is a
way of encouraging implementations of it. Especially since it seems we
do have a lot of implementations of it.

It would be fantastic if e.g. Blender armature animation was exported
to X3D. It is already possible, as H-Anim supports the necessary
features --- what is miss is the actual code on the side of Blender
(Python) exporter to X3D.

I hope that this opinion helps:)

Best regards,
Michalis



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