-Questions on character animation-

Troubleshooting General Help
1

Hi all,



I with some friends are learning coding jME and we'd like

to have some info about creating and animating a character.



In order to create an human body and to animate it, a frind of my 

started  working on Cinema4D.

With this software (that can export files in 3ds format) you can 

create a body and insert bones into it. The bones modify the 

structure of the geometry they are connect to; in this way you change 

the position of the bones, and your character change position: you 

can animate it.



After this work we are having some trouble exporting this work in 

order to insert it in jme.

We were thinking that an animation created with Cinema4d was 

available from jME in this way: you load an object called "body" and 

with some property you can choose different frames to show.

But our works in this way failed up to now.



So I ask:

  • How to create an animated character?


  • The bones are useful to jME?

    With that I mean should we insert the bones into che character 

    because jME'll be able to handle them animating the body or should we 

    create an animation (different) frames?



    Thanks for any suggestions!



    t1t0, isec, firstlele





    P.S.

    Our main purpuse up to now is to understand the engine and it's 

    structure, we have no "particular" project purpose; because of that 

    we'll be very happy to meet or join other developers in the same 

    situation to work togheter and exchange ideas.
2

there is an example .3ds in src.jmetest.renderer.loader and it is animated.

im not sure if skeletal animation works with jme ive only tried a simple keyframe animation in blender.

3

3ds does not support skeletal animation try milkshape3d :frowning:

4
mcbeth said:

3ds does not support skeletal animation try milkshape3d :(


This weekend I tried milkshape and animated a model.
It seems to me that there is just "simple sceletal animation" (no real bones and vertex weighting).
Scince I'm still a newb, I ask:
Is there any format and modelling software that considers even such things for real time games?

Is a combination of keyframe and sceletal animation possible? (e.g. a breathing, walking person)
5

hence the sad smiley…if that makes sense :slight_smile: however I did ask for help to port the md5 loader and animation system to jme 0.9 or .10 but that will be a while in the future :slight_smile: I dont have the skills to do it myself unfortunately and the original author is nolonger with us.



I also need weights and some other feature of that for my game… thing

6

Weighted Skeletal is quite common in modellers ( eg. blender ) but is not supported in jme right now.

But if You export as MorphTarget this takes the wheighted animation with it.

7

First of all, thanks for your answers



mud2005, I saw the 3ds loader source, thanks for the tip

keyframes are simple to use, but i can't export animations in a 3ds

file with blender nor cinema4d: they only export the first frame :frowning:



I'm triyng to understand how the quake3 animations (.md3) work using

their animation.cfg files, but the man who made this cfg was a fool

I'm reading the "Java Md3 Viewer" sources in order to get the right 

frames



which tool could I use on linux to create animations that I could 

import in jme?



I like blender, but I need a more complete exporter than could handle 

animations



Bye

8

From what I understand from this post, you can create animations in blender and use the blender-to-jme-xml export tool.