Quote:
Originally Posted by Hans Witteman
Hi skwasjer,
First i like to thank you for your intervention in this thread and i am glad to see you are still following the SH3 mod forum an honor to have you here 
It clarify a lot but i might sound like a newb on this one i mean what is the delta is it in s3d because when i do morphing in max i have a delta option in the controller menu?
And second when you say take the base mesh does it mean we cannot add a new custom character mesh?
Also i remember i post you a pm earlier this year on animation and i didn't reply because of health problem just want to apologize for not answering back now health is better fortunately 
Best regards Hans |
No problem, good to have you in good shape.
I was just 'tech' babbling on how the actual animation frames are stored in the DAT-file. It's not really anything you should worry about. But if you want to know, the delta is a value that is computed based on the position of a specific vertex A, in frame 1 vs the same vertex A in frame 2 (where frame 1 is the base model/frame). It's basically subtraction, and you end up with a value called delta. All delta's are compared for the highest and lowest, and this final 'range' can then be used to determine the resolution, translation and initial offset. The
initial offset (float) is a value that all vertices 'inherit', the translation is a
factor (short) of
resolution (float), which is added to the initial offset (for each component xyz). The final value is then the actual (new) position of the vertex. The finer the resolution (which is just computed using an algoritm, and depends on each model/frame), the more 'lossless' the compression is. As you can see, this can save quite a few bytes of data, since per frame the initial offset and resolution are just merely taking up 8 bytes of data, and each vertex only 6 bytes, whereas normally each vertex would take up 12 bytes + index table. This is a factor of > 2 compression. I don't have the details (nor do I have SH + S3D installed), but I remember quite alot of space savings was achieved this way. The biggest downside of this approach though, is to uncompress, expensive multiply operations are needed. But I'm sure the devs made the right tradeoff between load times and overall game size... Todays computers shouldn't really feel the pain though, this is a decided upon like what 6 years ago?
I'll save you from how my algorithm specifically computes all this, because it is a bit more complex and not really interesting.
The option in Max has nothing to do with this specifically, but the term delta can be explained in similar way, you probably specify the maximum allowed range of the morph algorithm (I am no Max expert, and don't know this controller).