High level steps for animation

Hi all I am interested in what the high level steps/approaches are for animating a character (third person) using the JME engine.



I am sure there are a number of approaches - obviously im interested the easiest one for me -> I have a friend who can create an animated (running) charater in 3D Studio Max - what I am unsure about is



a) The best way (format) to import the model and texture into the JME engine. I'm lookg for a balance of quality and speed of animation.



b) How to take the animation scripting he has already created for character movement and "import" this into the JME engine (as a JME "script" import I guess?)



c) How I would go about controlling the character onscreen - do i simply call the scripts in b) above, or do I have to write my own scripts (in Java) to control the running sequence and throw the already scripted 3D Studio Max movement out?



Really looking for a bit of guidance here…



Thanks in advance

A.) The two best supported are MD5 (MD5Importer) and Ogre.  http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/wiki/doku.php?id=code_snippets_-_jme_2



B.) There are exporters for 3ds that exporter into MD5 and Ogre formats I’m sure read these threads for more details into each format.



Ogre:

http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?topic=9097.0

MD5:

http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?topic=7323.0



C.) To play animations you use the importers, but as to which animation plays when that’s up to you to decide.

Thankyou!