Access to bone weights for vertexes

[Niosop]

Could we get access to getting bone weights on a per vertex basis and also have access to setting these? This would let us write our own "uniquify" code so you wouldn't have to worry about introducing bugs into the main engine.

[Niosop]

Any idea about if you are considering adding this?

[Niosop]

Bump...any feedback? Might happen, not gonna happen, technical problem w/ adding it, low priority, anything?

[wh1sp3r]

perhaps, Josh is sleeping

[Niosop]

LOL, if he's been sleeping for the past 4 days then he should ignore this request, he's got bigger problems to worry about.

[Josh]

It's not as simple as "this vertex is weighted to this entity". The model has internal indexes of bones when it is loaded, and the vertex data references those indexes instead of the bone entity. The bone data is uploaded to the GPU in an array, and the vertices access this array with their bone indices.

[Niosop]

Nod, yeah. I'm just looking for a way to use the existing bone data array w/ a new mesh. So to make an animated mesh either temporarily or permanently non-instanced then you could use a makeUnique script that would create a new mesh, copy the surfaces, assign the same bone weights to the duplicated verts in the new surfaces. Then you hide the original mesh, assign a material to this new surface and it would still be animated. Then to switch back, you just destroy the new mesh you created and unhide the original mesh.