Reviews Tips Tutorials Drivers Browse by subject . A free service rounding up the week's news, articles, tips and reviews. While increasing the number of polygons and lights that can be included in a scene has a major impact on visual quality, it is not quite enough to truly bring characters to life.
Character animations are equally important.
ATI s Charisma Engine includes accelerated support for unique features that take character animation to the next level. Many 3D game developers are using a technique known as skeletal animation. This involves defining models as a series of bones , to which is attached a skin consisting of a mesh of vertices, a web of polygons. The movement of one or more bones, according to a given weighting value can influence the position of each vertex. Thus, simply defining the movement of its skeleton can animate a model, and the movements of the vertices that define the skin can be generated mathematically.