Case case basis will examine the skinned mesh creation process

generally the cleanest way to deal with skinned mesh characters and will be the method we prefer in this course.

Recall that if any animation data is stored in the X file, then an interface to a D3DXAnimationController object will also be returned. This will allow us to play back those animations to update the bones of our skeleton (and consequently, the skin). As discussed, the pAlloc parameter is only used when parsing custom data objects in the X file. Since we will not be requiring custom data in this chapter, we can assume that this value will be set to NULL.

The pSkinInfo parameter is set to NULL when we are passed a normal (non-skin) mesh. For normal meshes, we simply store them in the mesh container and return as we did previously. If however, the pSkinInfo parameter is not NULL, then it means that the mesh we have been passed is to be used as a skin and it should have its vertices mapped to different bones in the hierarchy. When this is the case, we

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While examining each skinning technique we will look at how the CreateMeshContainer method should be written to correctly generate the skinned mesh for use with that technique.

11.7 DirectX Skinning I: Software Skinning

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