The Jointed Monster...
I've been rigging joints to each of the troll's vertices for the last week. It took me a while to get the skeleton into a shape that I was happy with. In order for the creature to show emotions I need to be able to control facial expressions from code. I ended up using just two controllers for the brow and mouth. With these two face joints I can create quite a few facial expressions. In order to keep animation production time to a minimum I decided to use as few joints as possible throughout the whole skeleton. For example one joint on each foot controls the front three toes.
Looks like someone didn't get their coffee!
Hand Signals...
I did add one joint for each finger as complex hand gestures are needed for the Troll to communicate with the user. This was an idea my wife Christi put forth. The Troll will be able to communicate its needs using a sort of sign language. I'm not sure if this will be a learned behavior or not.
Archive Tool...
I created the interface for the now completed archive library. For those of you who saw my Material Editor you'll recognize the style. As a side note all of my exporters and my animation compiler look similar. The main interface to the archive directory is an overloaded CListBox. Write now it's mostly a shell but by tomorrow it'll have some functionality.
