Look ma, limbs!

Sort of. I still need to scale, move, and rotate the boxes appropriately, but hey, it's parsing limb length fine and differentiates between each of the four limbs.

As this is for bipedal, bilateral humanoid characters, we assume there are left and right arms, left and right legs, and no more. Let's save the six-legged, winged horses from Avatar for version 2.0.


Rather than take a sketch and parse it, we actually record as the artists draws. Matching the familiar "QWER" format of Maya itself, artists can switch between drawing the spine, flat bones (not yet implemented) and limbs. Each is differentiated by a different color. I went for the less eye-burning ones.

The spine is always stored from the pelvis to the head, even if not originally drawn that way. This will help in the future for skeleton generation, where the root is commonly placed in the pelvis. We determine if reversal is needed through a simple test of the endpoints' Y co-ordinates.

We determine which curve is which very roughly. No limbs can be drawn until the spine is. Most artists won't even consider drawing limbs before the spine, but it's a good precaution. We assume that artists always draw limbs going away from the trunk. At the moment, there is nothing coded in to enforce this, and hopefully I can tend to this later.

First, we determine if a limb is on the left or right of the body (again - we assume bilateral figure). The spine is simplified into a straight line on the X axis. Anything entirely or mostly to its left is a left limb. Anything entirely or mostly to its right is a right limb.

Then we figure out if it's an arm or a leg. Because we assumed it was drawn away from the trunk, we take its first point and compare the distance of this point to the endpoints of the spine. If it's closer to the pelvis, we assume it's a leg. If it's closer to the head, we assume it's an arm.

Once we know what we're dealing with, we check if we need to mirror it. If an artist doesn't draw a limb on the left side but does on the right, we mirror the right limb to the left. The same goes for vice-versa. We do this by mirroring the simplified limb over the Y axis formed by the spine.

Each curve is simplified (we only take every 10th drawn point, going from say 287 to 28, which may still be too much) and saved into a vector. The endpoints of each vector are used to determine the length. It causes a lot of curve information to be lost, but I feel it is okay since we do not want to distort our future import mesh too much. Also, I know we will need straight lines for making future skeletons. It's all put into our handy-dandy FigureDataNode from last time.

Now, if only I could erase. :(