During the last week I’ve done extensive testing on how to implement 3D animation. There are two ways to go about this: Write everything from scratch, which is hard to do because of the limited time we have for this project, or use an existing library. I have found three libraries that work on both PC and Xbox.

KiloWatt is by far the best library. Fast and versitile, but with the drawback of beeing complicated to use and it having no documentation what so ever. Is took me about a day to write a wrapper for KiloWatt. The wrapper makes it really easy to load and play animations.

Many people using KiloWatt have had problems with playback of short animations. If the animation contains to few frames, the last frame is padded to get the correct length. This makes the animation ”freeze” once every loop cycle.

The problem is actually caused by the XNA .X importer and not KiloWatt. There are two ways to fix this. One is to filter out and remove duplicate frames in the content proccessor and the second ,easy but uggly way, is to change the NumFrames field in the KiloWatt animation class when loading the models. The padded frames will still be there, but they will not be played.

Tags: 3d, animation, fix, importer, Kilo Watt, models, PC, Penalty of Heroes, playback, wrapper, Xbox, XNA

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 8:49 am and is filed under Development, Picture, databox games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.