Pose / morph animation.

[L0ngman]

I am interested in using the techniques used in one of the ogre demos, the facial animation with all letters of the alphabet as poses to morph the face to.

Can this only be achieved by using bones in 3ds max, because in max you can do morph animation without using bones, just from one mesh to another.
?

Cheers

Rich.

[joi]

If im not wrong, this is taken from dagon notes;

New 'VertexAnimationTrack' allows animation of vertex positions in a VertexData instance, either in software or hardware. Comes in 2 variants, morph animation (like MD2) and pose animation (blendable poses, e.g. facial animation)

Pretty sure most of the facial animations including games and movies uses vertex and not bone animation. Might be wrong though.

[sinbad]

Demo_FacialAnimation uses pose vertex keys, not bones.

Vertex Animation Explained in the Manual

The 3ds exporter doesn't support vertex animation yet (because we don't have a 3ds license). Only the XSI and Blender exporters do.

[L0ngman]

I have both ogre exporter and octopus export for 3dmax installed.

I am finding it tricky to export animation. I only want to export 0-2 frames, each has a key frame, 0 will be my initial pose and 1 & 2 are poses i will use for weights on altering the initial pose.

When I use ogre exporter, the animation part always seems greyed out, even when I have used an octopus modifier on my mesh to specfiy the animation frames.

Just for reference, in max 7, my 0-2 frames all have key frame keys on the timeline and each of the 3 frames changes my model in the viewport, so surely that is an animation in max ready for export.

Any tips?

Thanks in advance
Rich.