Universal Editor module for VMD file format

Finally finished the excruciatingly painful analysis of the VMD file format (versions used in both V1.30 and V7.39 of MikuMikuDance). I'm rather proud of it because it's the first time in a long while that I've actually figured something out just by tweaking values, not actually looking at other people's (free) source code.

I added support for the VMDMotionDataFormat in Universal Editor, so hopefully when I get around to finishing the animation system for my renderer it will be able to read (and convert!) VMD files generated from both versions.

This was excruciatingly painful primarily because of the way the bone frames are stored. It was interesting to notice that the only difference between V1.30 and V7.39 file formats (besides the model and bone names) were the field sizes of the model name (10 bytes in old version, 20 bytes in new version). But the way the frames are stored is hideous.

For each keyframe, it stores the bone data block (name of bone, position and rotation of bone, and interpolation data) for each bone affected at the keyframe. This is not that big of a deal... except that the keyframes aren't actually stored in the order they should appear during playback. They're stored apparently randomly, though presumably (I haven't tested it) in the order that the user adds them to the timeline. I ended up making a class RawFrameData to store the frame index and bone information, storing all of that information in a System.Collections.Generic.List<RawFrameData>, then sorting that list in ascending order by the frame index.

I then created three classes: a MotionFrame class, a MotionAction (abstract) class, and a MotionBoneRepositionAction class which inherits from MotionAction.

MotionFrame has a frame index and collection of MotionActions (so that other actions, such as texture changes, can be recorded on the keyframe as well, though these aren't supported by the VMD file format and will require a new Concertroid-specific file format to store them). The MotionBoneRepositionAction represents a bone position/rotation change, and stores all the data that was originally present in the VMD file.

A quick note: the model and bone names between the PMD models are bound to be different, and the model and bone names in the model for the single-model MikuMikuDance V1.30 are hardcoded, so if I develop a converter, it will have to feature some way of allowing the user to map old VMD bone names to new VMD bones and vice versa. Also, supplying an XML configuration file with the bone mappings already laid out for some of the more common models (hanaminasho, kio, animasa, etc.) would probably not be hard to do, assuming I can find the time to work on them. This would also allow you to convert VMD motion data between models that have different bone names...

Anyway, no screenshot for now because there really isn't anything to show. Once I develop the user interface for the converter, I'll post that. But since I've completed VMD support (I checked by converting World is Mine from V7.39 to V1.30 and it played perfectly!) I am not going to do much more with it at this moment.

Right now, my focus is on getting my renderer to animate with the given animations and/or pose files. So until next time, thanks for reading!