I have a Collada file with a rigged mesh. I've read the node tags in the library_visual_scenes tag and extracted the matrix for each node and stored everything in a hierarchical bone structure. My Matrix container is "row major", so I'd store the first float of a matrix tag in the 1st row, 1st column, the second in the 1st row, 2nd column, etc. From what I gather this is the Bind Pose Matrix. After that I went through the tag and extracted the float array in the source tag of the skin tag of the controller for the mesh. I stored each matrix from this float array in their corresponding Bone as the Inverse Bind Matrix. I also extracted the bind-shape-matrix and stored it.
Now I'd like to draw the skeleton with OpenGL to see if everything is working correctly before I go about skinning. I iterate once over my bones and multiply a bone's Bind Pose Matrix by it's parents and store that. After that I iterate again over the bones and multiply the result of the previous matrix multiplication by the Inverse Bind Matrix and then by the Bind Shape Matrix. The results look something like this:
[0.2, 9.2, 5.8, 1.2 ]
[4.6, -3.3, -0.2, -0.1 ]
[-1.8, 0.2, -4.2, -3.9 ]
[0, 0, 0, 1 ]
I've had to go to various sources to get the little understanding of Collada I have and books about 3d transform matricies can get pretty intense. I've hit a brick wall and if you could please read through this and see if there is something I'm doing wrong, and how I'd go about getting an X,Y,Z to draw a point for each of these joints once I've calculated the final transform, I'd really appreciate it.