Animated meshes bounds

[mth4]

Hey,

animated meshes doesn't take current animation into account in calculating their bounds. Because of this they disappear frequently at certain camera angles, even if they are clearly visible. Mouse raycasts are also affected by this problem.

[richardolsson]

Thanks for reporting! This is a very peculiar problem. Because some of the animation happens on the GPU, it's difficult to keep the bounding volume up to date frame by frame in CPU land.

My suggestion would be to make the bounding box large enough to fit all frames of the animation. In vertex animation this would be fairly easily accommodated, and could even be restricted to only include those frames that are currently being blended between.

In skeletal animation however I would guess that this is a little bit too complicated to be done with good performance and without requiring a large preprocessing step.

Maybe another fix that could be implemented as well would be to have user-definable bounding volume padding, i.e. letting the programmer (who is probably more familiar with the animation than the engine is) explicitly pad the bounding volume in all directions.

@lidev Can you have a think about this and then lets discuss it offline before applying some sort of fix?

[mth4]

User-definable bounding volume padding is a good idea as it will fix the problem also in the case of custom animations. I had an issue with this before and had to use NullBounds.

[richardolsson]

Relabeling this as a feature request for adding user-definable padding on bounding volumes.