Software Expressions

Well, I’m new to the XNA world, as well as the 3d animation world. My goal here is to put together the necessary pieces for developing a game. I’m attempting to piece together the puzzle for building some specific types of games using XNA. My primary focus is platform games using a 3D engine. The BulletX library seems to hold some pretty good potential, and I have a demo working for that. The next thing I’d like to do is start pulling in some characters into the physics world. Using XNA, a physics engine, and high polygon count characters is not a winning combination for performance, but my objective is to explore the concepts. For 3d character animation I was referred to www.daz3d.com, competitor to Poser. Daz3D is free, they make their money selling models, poses, clothing, plugins, etc. The tool is amazing, I will say that (given that I’m new to this). I am impressed with how easy it is to create an animating character and transition between poses. However, it’s very hard to do it well.

Daz3d has Aiko and Victoria as free downloadable character models for Daz3d, as well as some clothes, hair and a few poses. The next objective is to get this into an XNA application and into the content pipeline. My googling has led me to: AnimationComponents on CodePlex. I’ll have to see what comes of that. Looks like it can read BioVision files and Daz3d exports BioVision files, which is a good sign. There are a few things I hope to accomplish with AnimationComponents: 1) Get the model into my XNA application and rendered; 2) Get this working with the clothing, textures, bumpmaps and alphamaps; 3) Update the models parameters in my application to walk, and jump; 4) Apply collision shapes to the model so the model is able to interact with my physics world.

The XNA ACL library tutorials are well done. They have a dwarf character with several animating poses, idle, run, walk, and others. The tutorials take you through getting the dwarf to display, running an animating pose, making the dwarf move around using the keyboard, including walking and runnning, and then also how to blend controllers so the transition from idle to walk to run is convincing. ACL works with a skeletal structure, so it seems it would work well with Daz3d exports.

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1. Download Visual Studio C# Express
2. Download XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 from Microsoft
3. Download XNA Framework 1.0

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