I am interested on what advice may be given regarding the best format of animated model to use with jME. The only requirements are that the models can be exported from blender 2.4.5 and implemented in jME without any major headaches (meaning that the loader is supported directly in jME cvs). I have built the models and animated them with keyframes in blender. I don't have any bias over one format or another (yet ;)
For your requirements md2 is your only option.
Thanks. After writing my post I experimented a bit with md5reader2 and had a little success with a basic model comprised of two animation sets (about 75 frames each). I still haven't gotten the full scope on animation control or how best to implement it, but it all runs well enough. On your advice I looked into md2 but I couldn't get it to work properly – the first issue was that the texture would not show up so the model was all greysville. After going back into blender and trying to create the model more carefully, the problem was that jME would not load it, complaining:
SEVERE: Exception in game loop
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 163
at com.jmex.model.converters.Md2ToJme$Md2ConverterCopy.parseMesh(Unknown Source)
at com.jmex.model.converters.Md2ToJme$Md2ConverterCopy.<init>(Unknown Source)
at com.jmex.model.converters.Md2ToJme.convert(Unknown Source)
at testmodelmaterial.TestModelMaterial.simpleInitGame(TestModelMaterial.java:114)
at com.jme.app.BaseSimpleGame.initGame(Unknown Source)
at com.jme.app.BaseGame.start(Unknown Source)
at testmodelmaterial.TestModelMaterial.main(TestModelMaterial.java:92)
Dec 5, 2007 4:17:06 PM com.jme.app.BaseSimpleGame cleanup
Line 114 is:
converter.convert(modelURL.openStream(), BO);
I'm still not quite biased toward what model type to use, but I think that if I can work out how to kick off specific animations using md5 then I'll go with that for now. Any good examples of jME and md5 animation control out there?
http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?topic=6476.0 might be related to your md2 problem. are you using latest cvs jME?
The problem appears related. I am using the 1.0 release.
How about Collada format? Is that in full working order (supports static and keyframe animation) via jME cvs?
That's a rather difficult question to answer, due to the complexity of the collada format. Search the forum and read everything it has for collada, and you'll have a overview of what people have and haven't been able to do with different collada exporters.
Milkshape and MD3 are also good alternatives for animation. (and are supported out of the box). If you want to spend a little bit more time/effort, Ender (if I recall correctly, sorry if not) created some MD5 importer for jME which is under java.net cvs as jme-contrib… The only problem with those versions is that they were based on jME 0.11, and need slight (REALLY slight) changes to make them work on jME 1.0…
Even more, perhaps this thread would point the developer to make it 1.0 complaint and you would be pristine! 
Up until now I've been using jME 1.0, LWJGL current/release, NetBeans, Blender, and obj models for my lab/test world stuff – with attempted use of md2 and md5 for animated models. However, the work flow is somewhat hindered by the blender exports/jME imports for md2 and md5.
So… I think that I'll try: jME cvs (latest), LWJGL current/release, Eclipse, MilkShape3D, and obj and ms3d. Hopefully, this will give me a smoother workflow.
Anyone got any pre-trial gotchas (or pros and cons) with a setup like this?
Any extreme positives or negatives regarding animated ms3d models or ms3d in general?