Multi-shape actors and animations

Hey guys,

My team and I are working on a project for school. I'm currently handling the physics. We have NxOgre 0.9 compiled and working, our game has some simple objects, a first person camera and shooting (with decals).

The next state is to work on animations. I know by default NxOgre (or PhysX for that matter) only creates shapes (convex or whatever type you specify) for the meshes in their default pose. I'll just make a function that goes through the bones and creates capsules joined by joints. This will give NPCs realistic collisions when they are walking around.

I have two basic questions:

1. How can I "bind" a shape to a bone? is there any way of doing it or do I have to manually move the shape each time the character's bone (while in an animation) moves?

2. NxOgre's CharacterController has some unimplemented functions. I was wondering what this functions are supposed to do:

void Character::attachSkeletonMesh(const NxString&);
void Character::bindToAnimation(Movement, const NxString& AnimationName);
void Character::bindFeet(const NxString& leftBone, const NxString& rightBone);
void Character::unBindFeet();

I am specially interested in the supposed functionality of attachSkeletonMesh()and bindToAnimation(). If I can get a good description of what those should do, I can implement them for my own good and I'll post the code so everybody can benefit.

Thanks for your time, and thanks to betajaen for all the hard work!!

Ricardo
USC Gamepipe Lab

1. You have to manually move it, there have been a few posts on ragdolls including a bunch of code. Try the search.

2. They won't be implemented due to the new Character System appearing in Bleeding, but they were intended for making skeletons easier to work with in Characters.

In short, you'll have to do the animation part of the character yourself, like the rest of us.