skeleton animation features plugin

[pgruenbacher]

Some notes as I work on it to track.

• goal 1: implement gpu instancing for animations (cache bone transforms to texture) for crowd rendering. need it for my game personally. have godot implementation work well as POC.
• https://github.com/TheComet/ik implement IK library as part of the plugin? It's c++ implementation of FABRIK http://www.andreasaristidou.com/FABRIK.html
• https://github.com/guillaumeblanc/ozz-animation maybe? it's no longer active so maybe not.

[pgruenbacher]

so what took me a while to realize was that I just needed to set instancePosition : POSITION1 in the VertexCommon.bsl
and then simply apply the translation
I also simply hacked the gRendererUtility to write out the extra instance buffer
so the bigger question will be if there's potential for an easier API to accomplish this
next goal is wrapping up the gpu caching of the bone transformations which should allow for different animations for the instances

[christianclavet]

Wow! That look really nice and could give us the "physic ropes", I had access in the Source Engine.

[pgruenbacher]

currently on fork. requires manualy updating bsf to do instanced drawing.
https://github.com/pgruenbacher/bsfExamples/tree/skel_instancing/Source/SkeletalAnimation