Most Underwhelming Screenshot Ever

See that silhouette of a horribly broken foot? That's not just any broken foot, that's a fully hardware accelerated foot :-)

Ummm....

Yes I get what you're thinking... who cares? Well this particular foot is attached to a model exported from MakeHuman into an OpenGL Vertex Buffer Object, with the full armature and all skinning calculated on the GPU. I've spent the past few days banging my head against the ATI drivers wondering what crack they were smoking, and now I finally understand it all after writing a VBO-free version (that still uses the skinning vertex shader).

So....

This 13k poly model (all quads), with most of the bone structure implemented (I've got 70 bones, Makehuman exports about 120 last I checked), currently uses about a single percentage point of my CPU (I have a 4870x2, and as such, don't care how much GPU it's using), and the video card doesn't need to spin up it's fans to deal with this. The model data totals about 1Mb of video memory. I still have to write some code to "unzip" the texture seams (VBO's can't have multiple Texture Coordinates per Vertex). So, lots of work left, but all of the technical challenges have been conquered. Hazzah!