blendshapes / shapekeys are they supported?

Frank Cotton · April 26, 2022

I am currently making a werewolf character and wanted to know if should build it for bones only?

Looked around found an entry from 2005 talking about blendshapes not being supported or binding a bone to every vert

Does TDM support shapekeys?

Edited April 26, 2022 by Frank Cotton

HMart · April 26, 2022

Not 100% sure about TDM but this is what idSoftware said for Doom 3

Quote

The only animation system supported in Doom 3 is skeletal (no vertex animation like in Quake)

and I never read that the team changed how md5 animations are handled.

A community member, did revived the unused md3 animation system from quake 3, that was disabled but still on the engine and that is pure vertex animation but making the md3 play the animation, is not that user friendly and no one has ever made md5 and md3 models work together on the same character, for example md5 skeletal animations for the body and md3 vertex animations for the head, would be cool thou if possible.

LDAsh · May 28, 2022

Been getting into this stuff lately and thought I'd chime in.

Blender can bake any animations and attach bones automatically. It can even assign bones to each vertex for very complex and detailed morphing that uses rigged armatures (MD5) instead of embedded vertex animations. It's all possible, but the problem is that it's very expensive, so you need to manually optimise everything and think carefully about the actual end use-case. For example, you might get away with having 1 object doing a very complex morph in a cutscene, alone in a room with a fully curated environment, but not a warehouse full of hundreds of them all dynamically animating and interacting with the player. I believe the MD5 format can probably handle a lot, but still have some hard limits in terms of number of joints and vertex assignments per bone, so that needs to be determined. Ogre has a limit of 256 bones per object and 4 bones per vertex, which is normally more than enough but quickly gets challenged doing this kind of baking.

A very low-tech solution is to decrease the "resolution" of the keys along the timeline. Default is 24 fps so baking will add a key to each one of those frames. Simply scaling everything in the Graph Editor 0.25, then again at 4, then optimise ("Clean Keyframes/Interpolation Mode") can quickly lower the density of the keyframing and save a lot of memory. When baking physics to animation, you want to keep a higher density at the moments of impact and lower density when the objects are falling/flying and coming to a rest at the end of its timeline. Different optimisations with different properties (even axes) can be done to minimise the keyframes without sacrificing the finer details of animation too much, with a little more effort. You can easily reach a point where it becomes quite useable by today's standards, if you're willing to put in the effort. I didn't even get into addons and scripts yet.

In terms of having a character, like a werewolf, that would do a full morph in a particular sequence - it sounds like you want 2 entirely discrete characters with a 3rd morph-sequence-entity that only occurs during a self-contained scripted transition, basically so that the character itself isn't lugging around 100s of bones and MBs of keyframes. Anything more complicated would require a more robust animation system engine-side, like ability to blend animations of specified bones while allowing the influence of others - animation-blending. IdTech4 doesn't have it. Doesn't mean you can't be clever and invent some workarounds, though.