No Bone Animations?

is it possible to have animations w/o bones?
cause when i took a look at the wc3viewer, i was watching the archer as a ref and i noticed the thigh would turn skinny when the legs bent for a walk animation, instead of showing an empty space on the knee

well, the legs defeinitly get thinner, but idk whats going on with the bones/mesh. maybe blizzard didnt cover the mesh with the skin modifyer enough....

weird...

er... what i meant was that blizzard uses mesh editting instead of bones for animations, not sure what you meant actually

thats cause i wasnt sure what YOU meant... :D

well, im pretty sure blizz uses bones in all thier models. mesh editing is pretty hard, though not as much on building models.

anyway, yea i guess thats that...

sorry for the misunderstanding.

-flames'

Yes, it is possible to animate without using bones. I currently use it on majority of my
models.
To be honest mesh animating is easier then using bones, although once you know how to set the pivot points it takes very little time.

well, yeah, i did try it and it seemed a lot better than using bones from my PoV, though i don't know how to get the auto key to make the model change only for one key
basically, in other words, its as if you animated with bones w/o the auto key selected

I don't quite understand your last part about the auto key could you elaborate.

Usually (standard animation design) bones are placed at the pivot points of the model (i.e. knee, neck, belt,...) and linked together (i.e. hand is linked to lower arm, wich is linked to upper arm, wich is linked to upper chest wich is linked to belt, etc.) That way one can ensure that the bone movement of child bone will always be relative to movement of parent bone. Unfortunately, you'll have to resize child bones and/or even meshes if you want to vary size. Now that's not a problem with realistic movement, since you want the arm to be of the same length all the time but when doing cartoon-style movement, where everything is exaggerated and subject to change in size/shape/whatever, it could be a problem

The other design allows you to set simply move objects around without setting any bones. This will enable you to change the shape/size of your object easily, but it will also mean you'll have to manually move every single element in every frame where its position should be different than before/after, making sure that all connections remain in place.

The third option, used by Blizzard is creating a bone system that has elements connected to a parent bone, but at the same time, the actual upper and lower leg are each separated with another bone. That way Blizzard can resize and deform object, exaggerating the movement easily. Since the main bones are not in the actual pivot points, one simply moves the lower leg bone a bit down and voila: you have a longer leg!

wow... lol this is more complicated than i thought, i'll stick with bones i guess

I'm not sure I understand everything, all I know about modelling is what I've learnt from Blizzard models. Tufy, are you speaking of the fact that most blizzard models use a bone and a helper for each body part?

Yeah. But unlike standard animation procedure where you link for instance lower arm to upper arm, Blizzard usually has a bone that has upper and lower arm linked to it, but the arms are not linked to each other.

Thanks, I see now.