F E A T U R E S :

Object animation

Sarge can read object and bone informations from LightWave 3D® [8] scenes. This means that you can record any position, rotation or scale value of your object at any keyframe, and SARGE will play it, whether it is negative or positive keyframe number on the timeline. You are also able to change animation's start and end frame on the timeline, and SARGE will play it as it is set. Example that is given in demo is girl's pirouette animation that starts from frame -10.

Bone animation

Most important feature of SARGE is that it imports all bone informations into your engine and play animations that are using object's weightmaps which determine the influence of each bone onto animated object. This allows importing of your character animations, and then playing it in your engine or game.

Mesh morph feature

This feature gives you the opportunity to add details to your animation by accessing the objects at their point level and animating them with more precision than you will ever be able to achieve by just using bones.

With the mesh morphing your objects can be deformed in any way you need. You can increase the quality of your animation by making facial expressions for your characters and be able to control specific muscles and areas of the character's body.

It also allows you to refine any deformations and sideffects caused by the bones, such as unwanted shoulder bulging when your character raises his arms too high.

Ragdoll

With ragdoll physics any mesh in your game or application can have natural and realistic reactions to the ever present forces, such as gravity, or any other force that will come out as a result of collision with another mesh. That is because every bone of your model can be instructed how to behave and react to any force that is being applied to it. Bones can also change their previous behaviour, if the force itself is being changed or if collision with environment happens during that time. Best example of ragdoll physics in today games is realistic interaction of characters with their environment during any falling or dying animations.

With SARGE you can add ragdoll physics to your objects and characters. All data needed for ragdoll can be generated directly from your animation scenes. Bounding boxes that define the boundaries of collision area around each limb are generated easily around every bone, and are used for collision calculations. Many parameters of ragdoll physics can be changed, such as the strength or nature of bouncing forces, rotational limits of bones, friction values and many other things.

Parenting

SARGE reads child and parent hierarchy from your scenes by the book. You are able to parent any object or bone to another object or bone. Parented objects can be simple geometry, without bones. Or they can be complex objects that have bones that use weightmaps and have their own animations, all of which are totally independent from the parented object.

Fast object replacement

With SARGE you are able to do fast replacement of objects during your animations, regardless of the object's complexity. For example, it can be swapping of an assault rifle with the sniper rifle in your character's hands. Or it can be the replacement of more complex objects, such as the swapping between two different hair styles, out of which one is animated. In SARGE girl demo, short hair is simple object without bones. Second hair style, the long hair pony-tail, is object with weightmaps and bones, which was then animated separately to fit the girl's motions.

This is a very important feature to have in today game engines, allowing you to make fast and easy replacement of objects during animation, such as weapons, equipment or even animated clothes.

Use bones from object

SARGE supports this very useful feature. It allows parenting of an additional object to your base model, and then using bones from the base model. This forces parented object to animate with the bones of your base model skeleton. Best examples of this feature are kevlar vest and leather jacket from SARGE demo.

Animation interpolation

To be able to have smooth transitions between your motions, SARGE gives a certain amount of motion blending between two different animations resulting in more natural appearance of your characters. Any played animation can be smoothly interpolated with another, no matter at which state current animation is. Best example for this is the pirouette motion shown in SARGE demo, that can be interpolated with any other animation, at any degree that it currently has.

You can also mix as many different animations as you need, and you can precisely determine the ammount of the mixing, by using a percentage value. For example, you can start with WalkWide, and mix it with 50% of WalkSexy anim, and 25% of WalkShoulder anim. On top of that, you can then mix it with any other animation that is currently playing.

Lock bones

SARGE supports the lock bones feature. During transition from one animation to another you can lock any bone, so it does not get faded to the specified target animation. Best example is the soldier's reload animation. He continues walking or dancing with his legs, while his upper part of the body is reloading the weapon. Reload animation itself, is just a single animation where soldier is animated in the standing position. With help of locking bones feature, only the upper body is used to be mixed with any other animation.

Null replace feature

This feature allows you to replace null objects from your scene with another object or with the whole scene. This way you can easily incorporate already prepared scenes into your final animation.

This feature is already used in a game developed by DnS. One of the goals was to make various weapons to which player can attach a high number of optional equipment, such as mini-scope, laser sight, silencer and so on. With null replacement feature of ARGE it was very fast and easy to make this happen. First, all needed nulls were positioned on character's skeleton. Then, every weapon has it's own setup scene with base model and all of it's attachments. In the final
animation, null that is in character's right hand gets replaced with the proper weapon scene. Same is with all other weapon places on character, that can be replaced with any other weapon that player may carry at the moment.

Examples for Direct3D 9 and OpenGL

SARGE SDK delivers example source codes for two APIs - Direct3D 9 and OpenGL using HLSL. This shows all the benefits of using SARGE. Just within a few hours, you are able to include your own animated characters into your own application.

The shaders give you the ability to have nice lighting and bump effects.