Buffergeometry with morphAttributes doesnt get animated shadows

[izatar]

I have a geometry with morphTargets that I converted to a buffergeometry using .fromGeometry. This reduces them memory overhead of the animated model by a very large amount.

It appears that the .morphTargets information has been moved to the .morphAttributes field, and the .morphTargets field has been removed. note: I have seen no documentation on this at all!
So I modified the MorphBlendMesh code that makes animations to use the .morphAttributes instead of .morphTargets, and it works great!

Except for one little hitch. The WebGLShadowMap.js doesn't know about .morphAttributes, it only knows about .morphTargets, and on line 324 it uses the length of .morphTargets to decide whether or not to set the _MorphingFlag which makes the shadows animated.

My workaround is to add a fake 1 entry .morphTargets fieldto my BufferGeometry so this test passes and the _MorphingFlag gets set, and then the shadows get animated.

I think WebGLShadowMap.js could check for the existence of the .morphAttributes as well, and set the _MorphingFlag, because the work-around is pretty silly. On the other hand, I am in over my head here and I'm sure someone will will come chop it off shortly.

[mrdoob]

It appears that the .morphTargets information has been moved to the .morphAttributes field, and the .morphTargets field has been removed. note: I have seen no documentation on this at all!

BufferGeometry never had a .morphTargets so there is no change to document.

Except for one little hitch. The WebGLShadowMap.js doesn't know about .morphAttributes, it only knows about .morphTargets, and on line 324 it uses the length of .morphTargets to decide whether or not to set the _MorphingFlag which makes the shadows animated.

Good catch! I guess we don't have any example/test that covers that.

[mrdoob]

@tschw do you have time to take a look at this? while trying to get this to work (adding new THREE.BufferGeometry().fromGeometry() in webgl_shadowmap) I'm getting errors in the animation system.

[izatar]

BufferGeometry never had a .morphTargets so there is no change to document.

Indeed. No change to document. What I meant was the information in .morphTargets in the Geometry are translated to the .morphAttributes in the BufferGeometry when .fromGeometry is used.
But .morphAttributes is not documented under BufferGeometry,..or is it?

[mrdoob]

But .morphAttributes is not documented under BufferGeometry,..or is it?

That is correct.

[tschw]

@tschw do you have time to take a look at this? while trying to get this to work (adding new THREE.BufferGeometry().fromGeometry() in webgl_shadowmap) I'm getting errors in the animation system.

I did not change any of the animation code that builds the property paths and don't know around with those all too well. @bhouston is probably the better candidate. However, I would read into it when he's currently not around.

In either case, I guess it'd be good to see the code / errors. Right now I wouldn't know what to look for and where.

[Astrak]

@izatar Seems the solution is to check also bufferGeometry.morphAttributes.position in addition to geometry.morphTargets in getDepthMaterial() :

var useMorphing = ( ( geometry.morphTargets !== undefined && geometry.morphTargets.length > 0 ) || ( geometry.morphAttributes.position !== undefined && geometry.morphAttributes.position.length > 0 ) ) && material.morphTargets;