Скачать или смотреть King's Crook Software Renderer: In-House 3D Animation Creator [Pure C]

In this short video you can see what I've been working on over the past few months. I was getting annoyed at how difficult it is to create/define 3D animations and how inflexible simple keyframing+interpolation is. Keyframing+interpolation is inflexible because I would need to create a new animation and keyframes for every model no matter if the structure of the model is the same as one that I've already animated. This is not feasible, of course, for a solo developer (who is not even great at computer art).

[Small note to those who asked themselves "why not just use existing 3D animation software?", the reason is the idea of this project/game is to make everything from scratch, including assets and tools]

After months of thinking about the best solution to this, I decided on "scripting" my animations. This way, I can define animations through a simple text file and I don't need to create a fancy and clunky piece of animation software. This also means that my animations are universal (in the sense that a walking animation will work for all humanoid models provided the models have the same groups as the groups used in the animation script).

The system works like this:
In the model editor, I group polygons together to label different parts of the model (e.g head, torso, etc.) then for each group, I define a "center of rotation" which is the point that that group will rotate about (these are seen in the video as yellow cubes).
In a text file (I decided the extension ARCH would be good for this), I define a hierarchy like so:
"rel g2 childof g1"
"rel g3 childof g4"
and so on..
Then, for the actual animation, I have a separate file (which I decided to give the file extension MASC to) I define the animation, frame by frame like this:
{ frame 0
speed 4
{ group 6
r 10,0,0
}
}
^ in this example, frame 0 is defined as having a speed of 4 and in this frame, group 6 gets rotated on the x axis by 10 pseudo-degrees.
These frames are cumulative, so animation is much more intuitive as the subsequent frame simply defines a transformation to be applied to the previous frame rather than from the "T-pose" state.

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