Animation system.

[3DModelerMan]

I'm new here and I was wondering if bullet did animation? Like in the Autodesk Human IK demo where the feet are placed on the ground dynamically. And does it also do just regular keyframe animation if I needed to do something like that sometime?
I'm going to use Irrlicht as rendering engine, but I want to know if bullet can calculate my animations and character physics so that I can wrap it into Irrlicht later.
Thanks.

[RBD]

Hi. Bullet is a physics engine for programmers. It doesn't do keyframe animation, nor is it an animation system per se. It won't do inverse kinematics natively either (although it does handle joint constraints, it's not an IK animation system). It's used to calculate the movement and collisions of rigid/soft bodies given the forces/constraints that act upon them and return new calculated positions/orientations. To animate objects with keyframes you would need to program this yourself (or use another tool... I don't know what the Irrlicht engine offers).

[3DModelerMan]

Okay sorry it took so long, I couldn't get logged in. Is there any library similar to Havok animation that integrates easily with Bullet? Preferably something free? I need to have realtime adjusted animation like Havok and HumanIK does. Then I want to use Bullet for controlling actual physics.

[Erwin Coumans]

We have been experimenting with inverse kinematics, linked to Bullet, in the past. We might include this work in the GameKit project in the future.

There is an open source IK implementation in the OpenTissue project. See http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=47172
Thanks,
Erwin

[3DModelerMan]

That looks cool... I found one called Cal3D, is that easy to integrate with Bullet?