Is it possible to do animation outside of Blender and actually get it into jMP successfully? I’m using 3DS Max 9, and it seems that 3ds and Blender don’t get along. I have trouble simply getting a model of any format to export WITH ANIMATION to Blender. The animations just do NOT want to transfer. I’ve tried every file type I have that supports animated meshes, but Blender refuses to recognize the animation.
So my question is, are there any other file types, via plug-ins or anything else, that support animation as of yet? I’d really rather not have to completely switch from animating in 3ds (where I’ve done TONS of animation already) to Blender, which I know basically nothing about… I’ve googled it and it seems it’s a common problem of getting animations from anything to Blender. Any help?
Is it a bone animation? 3D editors offer many ways to do things that are not really compatible to live game engine rendering.
Most of them are, but the one I’m messing with is a Key Frame animation. I’ll re-animate it with a bone animation and give it a try, I suppose. I’ll post the results here, and if it works I’ll explain any steps I had to take for anyone else who’s interested.
I give up trying to find a format that 3DS can export and that Blender can import that also supports animation. I don’t blame it on Blender, I blame it on the fact that A) I’m using a pretty dated version of 3DS, and B) There just really aren’t that many exporters OR importers that support animation anyway, for either software. I’m seriously disappointed, as I really want to get the animation out of 3DS. I’d really, really rather not have to redo every bit of animation I’ve done so far along side learning how to animate in Blender.
Someone needs to make a universal easy-to-read file type that supports animation and isn’t obscure. Sort of like *.OBJ but with animation added to it. Eh, it’ll come to existence sooner or later. For now I suppose I’ll just forget about animation and flesh out gameplay some more. 
Small thought: I messed with .X files, using an exporter for Max 9 I found, and I’m able to get the models into jMP, but half of the time the .X to .j3o converter fails, and the times it does work I get a null pointer exception when I attempt to get the AnimControl.class control from the loaded spatial. I’ll keep messing with it I suppose.
Why can’t you just use the OgreMAX exporter? You never mentioned the reasoning behind you not using it …
OgreMAX = $250 for an individual license. The free version is too limited for me to use it, if I remember the limitations right. I’ll double check them.