How do I make the Cylinder in the model?

Question

I have a class which will draw cylinders with deformer's index in the FBX file.

The deformer which was in the 3ds max's biped.

ex: If I have 22 bones in the deformer's structure, I will draw 22 cylinders.

But I was in trouble that I want to let these cylinders in the model.

And then I refer to the example (XNA Club Simple Animation 4.0) for my program.

But these cylinders are not in correct positions with the model.

How do I make these cylinders in correct positions with the model?

Answer 1

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but if you are trying to orient cylinders so that they align with the bones of a skeleton, here's a little code I wrote that will do this. It's using SlimDX, but porting it to XNA should be trivial.

for(int i = 1; i < nBones; i++)
{
    // get positions of bone and parent
    int p = hierarchy[i];
    Vector3 a = new Vector3(transforms[i].M41, transforms[i].M42, transforms[i].M43);
    Vector3 b = new Vector3(transforms[p].M41, transforms[p].M42, transforms[p].M43);

    // get bone length and scale the cylinder by that much
    float boneLength = Vector3.Distance(a, b);
    Matrix scale = Matrix.Scaling(boneLength, 1, 1);

    // get bone direction and create matrix to rotate towards that direction
    Vector3 dir = Vector3.Normalize(b - a);
    Vector3 axis = Vector3.Cross(Vector3.UnitX, dir);
    float cosine = Vector3.Dot(dir, Vector3.UnitX);
    float angle = (float) Math.Acos(cosine);
    Matrix rot = Matrix.RotationAxis(axis, angle);

    // declare sexy variables
    Matrix world;
    Matrix.Multiply(ref scale, ref rot, out world);
    DxUtils.translate(ref world, ref a);

    // do sexy stuff
    fx.world = world;
    fx.beginPass(0);
    _cylinder.draw();
    fx.endPass();
}

NOTE: It requires a cylinder of length 1 starting at the origin and going in the positive X direction... Just replace "UnitX" with "UnitY" if the cylinder is going up. This code assumes that the bone matrices are absolute transforms, not absolute inverses (which is what you would pass in for a skinned character)... so you might need to invert them all.