Animated models in Irrlicht

[Devil Master]

I'm not sure whether this post belongs here or in the off-topic section, since it's not a question about Irrlicht coding, but a question about the correct way to make an object that will be used with an Irrlicht program.

Anyway, I made a simple animated object with 3dsMax 5 (a bird with flapping wings), exported it to .3ds and loaded it with Irrlicht. I immediately saw that there was no animation. As a test, I also loaded it with Deep Exploration, which indeed considered it as a static object with no animation frames. So, how can I export it to preserve the animation? Did I just pick the wrong format? In that case, what format do I have to use (MD2? The animated models in the media directory are MD2...), and what plugin do I have to use to export it?

[cobra]

I use Blender, so I don't know about plugins for 3ds Max. But Irrlicht doesn't support .3ds animations currently. I don't even know if the 3ds format supports animations.


I haven't done any animated meshes. I use bones, but not animations. I just control them inside Irrlicht.


For that, I would use the .b3d format. You could also use Microsoft's .x mesh format. There are others I think. Those two are the best in this case, with Irrlicht.

[Lonesome Ducky]

If it's skeletal animation, it's best to use .b3d or .x. But, if you really want to, you can convert the skeletal to vertex based and save it as an md2. But md2 animation loses quality quickly with higher detail meshes.

[stefbuet]

3ds store vertex keyframe : try to export an animation to .3ds, then import it again in 3dsmax, you still got the animation.
However Irrlicht does not support 3ds animations at the moment.

And I found that:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/ind ... 53468.html

[ProjectIRR]

You could use collada

http://sourceforge.net/projects/colladamaya/

[mkEason]

You could use collada

http://sourceforge.net/projects/colladamaya/

but some people is saying that collada does not supporting animation export so far.
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... ht=collada

so who is right?

In fact, I tried exporting collada myself, with default settings, I failed to load any dae model into irrlicht when animation is included, nothing is showed, not to mention animations

[B@z]

anyway you can use this plugin for 3ds max to export it to b3d

im using b3d too, and had no problem until that. i think this is the best format for irrlicht with animation x3