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Jim Sachs · 03-21-2004, 01:47 PM

Just couldn't leave it alone, huh?

OK, here's the long, boring technical explanation I was hoping to avoid:

The fish are currently made of 6 parts - body, eyes, leftfin, rightfin, leftlowfin, rightlowfin. These are all moved and rotated together so that at low resolutions (up to 1024x768) they all appear to be part of one object. But now that many people are using bigger screens with higher resolutions, it's obvious that these parts are not really connected. For example, while the side fins are moved along with the body, they also must rotate on their own, and as they do so they slide back and forth and in and out, since the pivot point can't take everything into account (especially fishbend). By making the fin part of the body mesh, the base stays glued to the attachment point, and the texture stretches like skin when the fin moves. This is much harder to do, because instead of rotating a fin object, I must figure out which vertices comprise the tips of the fins, and rotate those. I already do this with the tail, so I know how to do it, but it's very time-consuming.

I'm still debating whether I should do the same thing with the eyes. Then each fish would be made of only one mesh.

03-21-2004, 01:47 PM	#82
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,774	Just couldn't leave it alone, huh? OK, here's the long, boring technical explanation I was hoping to avoid: The fish are currently made of 6 parts - body, eyes, leftfin, rightfin, leftlowfin, rightlowfin. These are all moved and rotated together so that at low resolutions (up to 1024x768) they all appear to be part of one object. But now that many people are using bigger screens with higher resolutions, it's obvious that these parts are not really connected. For example, while the side fins are moved along with the body, they also must rotate on their own, and as they do so they slide back and forth and in and out, since the pivot point can't take everything into account (especially fishbend). By making the fin part of the body mesh, the base stays glued to the attachment point, and the texture stretches like skin when the fin moves. This is much harder to do, because instead of rotating a fin object, I must figure out which vertices comprise the tips of the fins, and rotate those. I already do this with the tail, so I know how to do it, but it's very time-consuming. I'm still debating whether I should do the same thing with the eyes. Then each fish would be made of only one mesh. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium Last edited by Jim Sachs; 03-21-2004 at 09:22 PM.