How to do animated meshes in Blender?

[sd]

Hi there,

I'm new to Irrlicht, and Blender also, but have been playing around a bit, and compiled some of the examples and gone through the tutorials.

I wanted start out with something simple like making my first animated mesh. I saw the sydney.md2 and faerie.md2 files in the tutorial provided, and wanted to try doing animation of a rotating cube.

I have seen the discussion here about a similar issue:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... p?p=125909

From here I understand that the Irrlicht supports the following formats of animated mesh: b3d, x, ms3d, md2, md3

In Blender I have got both the b3d (Blitz 3D?) exporters, and have tried them. I have also tried saving as 3DS (not animated??) and .x (saved my frames, but did not include the animation), and .md2 (saved over 700 frames or something when I defined only 12). According to FKeditor (Irrlicht model viewer):
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=26092

But in none I could get my animation to work. I set it up in Blender, but going to the Keyframer, pressing "I" to set a keyframe to "Rot", going forward 12 frames, rotating the cube through the standard rotation tool, and setting another keyframe, pressing "I" for "Rot". In Blender it animates, but I cannot save as an animated mesh in any way.

The .md2 exporter talked about how it needed a UV map or something, and wouldn't accept my cube. But I used the Blender tutorial of a a UV map for the atlas/globe. That imported the texture into Irrlicht without having to specify it, but still rotating that wouldn't work either as an animated mesh.

Somewhere it talked about "baking" the animation before saving a .md2, but that didn't seem to help either.

Hope someone can help me with these basics,
Would help any other newbies with similar questions (unless this is already answered in the Irrlicht forms -- which I have searched for this stuff).
Thanks,
SD.

[xDan]

It could be that irrlicht only supports skeletal animations (except maybe .md2). In which case try adding a bone to your cube and then setting keyframes for this bone.

[sd]

Oh, I think when I tried the .md2 exporter it complained about me rotating the object itself instead of doing the rotation in terms of the verticies of the mesh. But I wasn't sure how to rotate the verticies without rotating the whole object. I guess you keyframe "Mesh" instead of "Rot", but still I don't know rotate verticies only. I tried "Mesh > Transform > Rotate" menu item .. wasn't sure if that was the same or different from the "Rotate manipulator mode".

Sure hope someone can help me on this, cause I'm right stuck right now, and haven't had much luck at all searching the web on "animated mesh", etc.

Thanks,
SD.