Model Editor is used to view newly exported models and animations, to create new materials and to edit animations in the game environment under various lighting conditions.
Animation Blending
providing complete control to the artist
The animation blending system allows a model to play more than one animation sequence at a time, while seamlessly blending the sequences. Animators are able to view their generic animations and blend their animations quickly and easily.
Compression
Animations can be compressed to as little as one tenth of the uncompressed size, reducing storage requirements. Compressions ratios can be fine-tuned by the artist, individually compressing scale, rotation and position channels.
Fully Data-Driven Art Pipeline
The BigWorld tool chain is fully integrated with DirectX 9 and implements a data-driven art pipeline using the FX file format and XML definitions and allowing the 3D engine and tools to support arbitrary vertex formats and shader importation. Support for the DirectX Semantics and Annotations standard allows automatic binding of render parameters to constant values and exposes ‘tweakable’ values to our tool chain. These ‘tweakables’ are also available to scripts, which allow Python game code to dynamically alter the look of objects by directly varying shader values.
The art pipeline also allows game shaders to be applied in 3D Studio MAX, closely previewing the game environment during model building and animation. This allows artists to see their work progress through the pipeline without any surprises or unknowns, dramatically increasing their productivity.