what are good mesh animation techniques?

I want to create a 2D game with monsters build as a custom vertex mesh and a texture map. I want to use this mesh to provide smooth vector animations. I'm using opengl es 2.0.

For now the best idea i have is to write a simple editor, where i can create a mesh and make key-frame based animation by changing position of each vertex and specifying the key-frames interpolation technics ( linear, quadric and so on).

I also have some understanding of bone animation (and skin based on bones), but i'm not sure i will be able to provide a good ske开发者_运维技巧letons for my monsters.

I'm not sure it is a good way to go. Can you suggest some better ideas and / or editors, libraries for such mesh animations ?

PS: i'm using C++ now and so c++ libraries are the most welcome

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You said this is a 2D game, so I'm going to assume your characters are flat polygons on to which you apply a texture map. Please add more detail to your question if this is not the case.

As far as the C++ part I think the same principles used for 3D blend shape animation can be applied to this case. For each character you will have a list of possible 'morph targets' or poses, each being a different polygon shape with same number of vertices. The character's AI will determine when to change from one to another, and how long a transition takes. So at any given point time your character can be either at a fixed state, matching one of your morph targets, or it can be in a transition state between two poses. The first has no trouble, the second case is handled by interpolating the vertices of the two polygons one by one to arrive to a morphed polygon. You can start with linear interpolation and see if that is sufficient, I suspect you may want to at least apply an easing function to the start and end of the transitions, maybe the smoothstep function.

As far as authoring these characters, have you considered using Blender? You can design and test your characters entirely within this package, then export the meshes as .obj files that you can easily import into your game.