Well, one problem is that it can be difficult to ascertain what angle the limb is currently pointing in, so rotating the limbs manually is often a complete headache, because a mesh deform animated model treats limb angles seperately, so if your animation frame had a guy with a knee bent at 90 degrees, it would still be at 0 in terms of DBPro's limb system, setting the knee angle to -90 would straighten it - but only for that particular frame.
The only real solution to the whole thing is to completely make your animation system manually with code, which is not an easy task. I'm mixing mesh deform animation with manual limb rotation to get the effect I want. I have a little dude with lots of animations, he needs to go into different poses for different weapons however, and he has to be able to pivot his waist to adjust his aim. I made 1 set of walking and running animations with his arms straight down, no motion in his upper body at all in fact, so as far as I'm concearned the top half is not animated in some frames.
I made a little poser program, basically let me rotate the bones in the un-animated arms to suit the particular gun. So I have the angles to set the limbs to, I can even fade between poses quite easily, and I can still rotate the torso any way I want and affect the orientation of his pose the way I want. That would work out for a first person game where you can change the firing direction by simply rotating a bone, but for complex systems, there are several disadvantages. Mixing manual and intrinsic animation is probably not what you had in mind.
It might be worth looking into hierarchy animation - like just a skeleton made from boxes, which is animated with limbs. Your character models would have to use the same skeletal structure, but that's no biggie, the idea is that you store all your animations in this hierarchy skeleton thing, then grab the rotation angles from this skeleton and apply them to your non-animated but boned character models. This would leave you with control over the bones when you need it for ragdolls and blending animations.
You could very well store your limb limits in an array like that, that's how I would do it - have a start and end range for your limbs for each axis - I'd probably make a little editor that let me specify this stuff and save it out as a file. Then when you come to apply ragdolls, you can check the collision status of each limb and affect it while being able to check the limits of each limb from the array.
Perhaps Patch6 will have some nice mesh deform features that'll be usefull to us, achieving what you want now will mean a lot of work, then TGC might come along and ruin your picnic with some fancy new commands. I'd suggest experimenting for now, just get limbs totally sussed out in your head first, try and calculate angles etc, it'll all come in handy in the long run.
Van-B
I laugh in the face of fate!
