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Hi,

I am a very nosey person and do like to dig about when I 1st get into a new toy. So I opened up a few of the FPSC characters to get accustomed to the way FPSC does it. I noticed that almost every rigged bone (i.e. ones that are actually used to distort any vertices) seem to have an extra dormant bone (i.e. bones not linked/weighted to any vertices) along with leftover biped nub bones on fingers and toes etc.

Maybe I am just to used to making characters for mmo's, but all them redundant bones seem to be little more than a waste of resources, as surely the engine still tracks them and would cause slowdowns with many enemies in view etc??

I have always tended to keep around the 20-25 bone limits for biped characters (of course more for complex beasts etc) and by deleting all the unrigged bones (of course not the gun/shoot bone, or the ground zero root bone) happily get the skeletons down to the 24/25 bone mark with no effect to the animations.

I could fully understand if they were actual lazy bones commonly used by people who cannot weight vertices/bones to a low bone count skeleton, as it makes getting the mesh to distort smoother much easier. Yet these bones are weighted to nothing and do nothing of any use that I can see.

I would like to know if those extra bones are actually required for FPSC in anyway? as they just seem a needless waste of resources, especially in highly populated rooms/levels.

You dont need all the bones,you can make a character with 1 bone,I did it once and worked as all those bones are just so you can apply that skeleton to any model and have all the animations done.So you can make your own skeleton and animate it and enjoy it.

ok, well, in a nutshell, the extra bones do not cause a lag, the bones are hidden in game. so there is nothing to render. when a modle is loaded into a game the modle it self is not loaded in the game, just the image. people acully think when a pc renders a modle in game its in game, this is how it works. when you load a modle into a windows window of any kind all the pc is doing is reading from that said direct x file. it did not load anything, it reads a said directory, this is why it uses memory. becouse when a pc reads so many difrent commands at once it can slow your pc down along with all the graphic slow down combined. so if the pc is not rendering the bones, there should be no slow down.

Huh??

Of course the model is loaded into the game. It's a 3D engine not Doom 1 and as such uses and renders polygons which are in turn tracked by the engine for collisions etc. Also bones are dynamic objects which the engine has to keep track off also, so more bones means more work and more work means less FPS in my understanding anyway.

Anyway djmaster kind of answered my question that the extra bones are just dead wait and can be removed.

It depends on how it was set up. What character was it and how did you view the contents?

The stock FPSC rig is just a standard Biped setup and there are no extra bones. In fact, it's a pretty spartan Biped, there's only one bone for the fingers. If anything, the basic setup needs a couple more bones. Specifically, twist bones in the forearms. If you look at stock char. Aiko holding a rifle and look at her collapsed forearms, you'll see why.

I've also seen that when .x are imported into Fragmotion, it appears to add a dummy bone for each of the biped bones so you will see Bip01_Pelvis>Bone1>Bip01_spine>Bone2, etc instead of simply Bip01_Pelvis>Bip01_Spine, etc. as it was exported. Now, if you take that same model and re-export to .x it will work except that in X10 the ragdoll is messed up. There is probably some correlation to be made there. (note: this is based on observations and not first-hand experience).

Errant: you got it spot on yups I opened the models in Fragmotion, so that explains those dead bones all over the place.

Fragmotion must hate .x, as it never does that with anything else (except add an extra skeleton bone to .b3d models and such)

Thanks for the reply and clear explanation