Sperry on 24/10/2020 at 23:00
I was wondering if anyone has tried creating a single mesh containing 2 bipeds side by side (or one in front of the other). It would be like a single entity containing 2 bodies. Does anyone know if this is possible, and if so what the result would look like?
FireMage on 25/10/2020 at 01:43
Well, where to start?
You can do complex meshes but in the case you mention, better have two separated meshes.
Because if you add two meshes in one Bin with the right Biped settings, you'll end up (if we imagine you've been patient enough to convince Meshbld to accept the conversion and and convert it correctly), you won't have new limps so your two bodies will play the same animations at the same time and there's no way to create new creature type to build meshes with different limbs category (ie with their own cal files structure).
So having two biped bodies in one mesh is doable but the result would be very disappointing and the amount of time to create the mesh really don't worth the effort unless you really have a good idea.
R Soul on 25/10/2020 at 12:37
Each joint (left elbow, left shoulder etc) has a centre of rotation (generated by cuboids). We also have to create planes to limit the polys that are affected by each joint.
Looking at a mesh file right now I can see that the limit planes are placed to the left and right, or top and bottom, of each joint, but there's nothing placed front or rear. You could therefore have a mesh in front or behind (poly count permitting), but its joints would rotate around those of the conventional mesh.
PinkDot on 25/10/2020 at 14:52
May I ask what are you trying to achieve?
Sperry on 25/10/2020 at 15:15
Thanks for the feedback. I understand that this is finally unpractical. Here are a few ideas about the application of such a weird concept:
1) having an AI with a "ghost" trail behind (the exact same bodies shifted a few units back and increasingly transparent).
2) creating a "crowd effect" to limit the number of AIs in game. In an area visible but also unreachable by the player, I thought that instead of placing 9 individual AIs for example, only two or three of these double AIs could be placed (assuming that the mesh files have the creatures at a sufficient distance from each other). The player obviously cannot interact with them. They would be following a "hard-coded" patrol to hide any inconsistencies. I was hoping that something like this, along with single AIs, could crate the illusion of a denser crowd (like something from Assassin's Creed) without killing the object count.
3) I'm curious if you have any ideas on how this could be used!