Skinned Meshes

I am trying to load and render a skinned mesh with animation from a .X file. That part was pretty simple. But what I want to do now is create an mesh instance to do all my rendering and animation from. I want this instance to refer back to the original mesh so that I can have only one skinned mesh in memory and have multiple instaces doing different animations.

Does anyone know of any good resources or tutorials that explains how to do this? I have a pretty good start on it but I keep getting an access violation that I can't figure out.

You need a mesh resource manager.

Store it once, use it multiple times.

Originally Posted by Bubba

You need a mesh resource manager.

That is where I am running into problems. While I have not created a manager class yet, I do have it set up to render multiple instances of the same mesh. Using a simple mesh was no problem, but I am running into problems using skinned meshes.

I can load and render a skinned mesh just fine, but when I try to do multiple instances I keep getting access violation errors at run time.

From what I understand I have to keep a seperate ID3DXMesh and Combined Transform Matrix for each instance but I am having problems making this work. I think I am actually making this harder than what it really is

Can anyone give me a web site or point me to a tutorial or even just explain how this works?

Well, I think I finally have it figured out. After much research I have figured that I have to load the mesh Hierarchy and for each instance of it I have to clone the frame hierarchy and the animation controller, then set the frame hierarchy to use the new animation controller. Everything seems to be working OK except that the program is hanging up in my FrameMove function at the call to ID3DxAnimationController::AdvanceTime(). Here is what I have so far

Code:

void CMeshInstance::SetMesh(LPDIRECT3DDEVICE9 pDevice, CSkinnedMesh *pMesh, bool MakeSphere, bool MakeBox) 
{
    Release();
    m_pSkinnedMesh     = pMesh;
    D3DXFRAME *pOriginalFrameRoot = m_pSkinnedMesh->GetFrameRoot();
    ID3DXAnimationController *pAC = m_pSkinnedMesh->GetAnimController();
    if (pAC && m_pFrameRootEx)
    {
        // Clone the mesh hierarchy
        CloneFrameHierarchy(pOriginalFrameRoot, &m_pFrameRootEx);
        // Clone the animation controller
        if(FAILED(pAC->CloneAnimationController(pAC->GetMaxNumAnimationOutputs(),
                                                pAC->GetMaxNumAnimationSets(),
                                                pAC->GetMaxNumTracks(),
                                                pAC->GetMaxNumEvents(),
                                                &m_pAnimControllerInstance) ) )
        {
            SHOW_ERROR("Cannot clone animation controller");
        }
        // Set our cloned animation controller to work with our cloned frame hierarchy
        if(FAILED(D3DXFrameRegisterNamedMatrices(m_pFrameRootEx, m_pAnimControllerInstance) ) )
        {
            SHOW_ERROR("Cannot register frame hierarchy with animation controller");
        }
  // Set the bones up
  SetupBoneMatrices(pDevice,(D3DXFrameEx*)m_pFrameRootEx, NULL);
  // Create the bone matrices array for use during FrameMove to hold the final transform
  m_pBoneMatrices  = new D3DXMATRIX[m_NumBones];
  ZeroMemory(m_pBoneMatrices, sizeof(D3DXMATRIX) * m_NumBones);
 }
    return;
}

and my FrameMove function

Code:

void CMeshInstance::FrameMove(float ElapsedTime)
{
    // Adjust animation speed
    ElapsedTime /= m_SpeedAdjust;
    // Advance the time and set in the controller
    if (m_pAnimControllerInstance)
    {
        m_pAnimControllerInstance->AdvanceTime(ElapsedTime, NULL);
    } else {
        SHOW_MESSAGE("Anim Controller set to NULL");
    }
    m_CurrentTime += ElapsedTime;
    // Now update the model's world matrices in the hierarchy
    UpdateFrameMatrices(m_pFrameRootEx, GetTransform() );
    // If the model contains a skinned mesh update the vertices
    LPD3DXMeshContainerEx pMesh = m_pFirstMeshEx;
    if(pMesh && pMesh->pSkinInfo)
    {
        UINT Bones = pMesh->pSkinInfo->GetNumBones();
        // Create the bone matrices that transform each bone from bone space into
        // character space, and also wraps the
        // mesh around the bones using the bone offsets
        for (UINT i = 0; i < Bones; ++i)
            D3DXMatrixMultiply(&m_pBoneMatrices[i],
                               &pMesh->pBoneOffsetsEx[i],
                               pMesh->ppCombinedMatrixEx[i] );
        // Modify the vertex positions based on the new bone matrices.
        void *srcPtr;
        pMesh->MeshData.pMesh->LockVertexBuffer(D3DLOCK_READONLY, (void**)&srcPtr);
        void *destPtr;
        pMesh->pSkinMeshEx->LockVertexBuffer(0, (void**)&destPtr);
        // Update the skinned mesh
        pMesh->pSkinInfo->UpdateSkinnedMesh(m_pBoneMatrices, NULL, srcPtr, destPtr);
        // Unlock the meshes vertex buffers
        pMesh->pSkinMeshEx->UnlockVertexBuffer();
        pMesh->MeshData.pMesh->UnlockVertexBuffer();
    }
    return;
}

in RED is where it hangs up. If I comment out that part then it runs just fine, just without any animation.

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong here?