Animating Blender models in jMonkeyEngine

General Discussion
1

I am new to jMonkeyEngine and a beginner in game programming in general. I’ve just finished going through the beginner tutorials and planning on learning more through creating a project. I’ve started going through some tutorials about Blender, and I was watching a video in which someone was creating a turret which can rotate 360 degrees and flip from side to side (- YouTube).
I was wondering on how can you control the turret through jMonkeyEngine, like rotate it by 30 degrees to the right?

I’ve seen an example in the tutorials which shows how to trigger a pre-defined animation which was created in Blender “https://wiki.jmonkeyengine.org/legacy/doku.php/jme3:beginner:hello_animation”, but in the game you might want to rotate the turret to random angles which would be hard to create an animation for each one of them, so what would be the correct way to do this?

2

In JME, you can have 3 kinds of animation:

  1. play some blender skeleton animation
  2. move some bones manually
  3. move parts manually

In your situation (the turret), I think that 3rd option is the best. You just have to get the child from the model, and rotate it.