Merging GLB meshes & attaching skeleton mangles animations

Questions
1

Hello!
I was trying to figure out how to merge meshes when importing a GLB file.
The end goal is to bake animations and use thin instances.

I found this was successfully done by some of the guys in the forums.
However with my character, it just mangles the animations when attaching a skeleton to the merged mesh. The model animations are imported from Mixamo and put together with Blender.

Playground (Uncomment the merge line)

Questions:

  • Is merging the way to go?
  • If not, should I somehow bake the animations for each mesh?
  • If yes, what causes the mangling when attaching the skeleton? Rotation related?
1 Like
2

I wonder what is the final goal of this setup. Are you going to have a lot of copies of your avatar?

3

I will need a performant way to handle hundreds of characters on the screen, with unique animations. Using thin instances is the only way I can think of doing it.

4

You must delete the parent of all meshes before merging them, otherwise you’ll integrate the parent’s transformation into the data, interfering with the skeleton’s animation data:

5

Can we use thin instances on skinned meshes and apply animations to them? If so, I wasn’t aware of that. I thought using thin instances limited most of the functionality.

6

I was surprised but it works for Ready Player Me avatar - https://playground.babylonjs.com/#CP2RN9#145

7

There’s a small section about it in the doc:

1 Like
8

@Evgeni_Popov Hello, I got another question. Is VAT only supporting single animations or can it bake all the different ones together? I don’t seem to get how it works. My model got a bunch of animations but it’s only playing the first one. Is there some something I need to do with the animation groups?

The goal would be to play a different animation for each thin instance.

9

You simply have to set, for each thin instance, the start and end frame corresponding to the animation you want to play. See line 41 in this PG:

10

But it looks like in this example it’s only looping the first animation “shooting a bow”.

It’s not randomly selecting a new animation.

11

Sorry, I did not see it was the same animation.

You will have to bake all the different animations in the same VAT texture. You can have a look here to see how it can be done:

Look at the bakeVertexData function.

1 Like