Modeling/Animation

     Using traditional methods, each frame of animation must be stored, taking up valuable memory. Using skeletal animations, many more animations can be used because only the bone structure and motion are stored in memory. This will give a much smoother animation. Ken showed me how the bounding boxes are separated into many small areas, arms, leg, torso, etc. This will allow you to shoot through somebody's legs or hit them in the arm and have their shoulder thrown back from the impact. With the skeletal system, skin is attached to the bones. This has the advantage of making changes very easy to accomplish, such as putting a different head on the same skeleton to create a new person. The game will contain a remarkably high 45 plus models. The models also have very high polygon counts and the engine seems to have no problem handling them.

     Ken had this to say on the animation system. "Being a skeletal animation system gives the animators a lot of freedom with the artwork. We've added new heads, new weapons, and sometime even replaced the entire model without having to touch any of the existing animations - a major time saving considering we have over 5000 frames of animation for some of the more active monsters. Ted created a female version of the player character and dropped it in about a half hour, something that would have been a major hassle if we had to rerun the model through every sequence in 3DStudio."