Irrlicht Engine

Hi,
i'm really pissed by now, because i spent the whole morning trying to create an animated object and finally putting it into irrlicht.
i tried cinema4D, that has an direct X exporter that does not seem to work with irrlicht (animations fail), the 3ds exporter only supports static meshes, as well does Wavefront fail. I also tried anim8tor with an direct X plugin... guess what. fails, too.
I'm really pissed now, so I'd like to know, which software you use to create and (important...) animate you characters, I'm so sick of only using static meshes.

Blender is said to be a pretty good solution, nice and free!

Personally i've used Milkshape a lot for my modelling but that's been mostly static meshes and the animation stuff in Milkshape ain't all that great it seems...

psychophoniac wrote: i tried cinema4D, that has an direct X exporter that does not seem to work with irrlicht (animations fail)

Does it work in Microsoft's directx viewer? If not the problem is with the importer, if it does then just upload the animated mesh somewhere so we can fix the X loader.

get mview here-
http://dump.bitplane.net/mview.zip

(at first, if i try to load the irrlichts "dwarf.x" one loader says he can't load and the other just crashes... )
hm. it seems like the animation is not exported properly (the viewers can show the mesh, but it seems like no animation is found) , i'll try to find another X-Exporter plugin for C4D...

edit:
okay found it. C4D does not export animations to an directX file, but there is an exporter written by others, its called XPort and you can get it here:
http://213.239.195.198/~philipp/download.php
i'll try if that solves it.

edit2:
okay, it does not support joints (but bones), and no changes in the mesh's form, but in the positioning what is at least a "progress".
all i have to do now is to make the change of the outer form get exported.

My business partner highly recommends fragMOTION for animating. It's a good general purpose modeller that especially shines when it comes to animation. It also exports to many formats, which probably isn't much of an issue with Irrlicht as it loads many mesh formats, however this can be useful if you use other engines (such as Ogre, to which it exports) and/or 3D modellers. I will be using it a lot soon because he has just dumped a whole lot of animation work in my lap.

3ds max for making the mesh, milkshape for animating.

Although milkshape's a bit of a pain because it never imports the unwrap correctly. :/

CharacterFX went free. Its good animating tool which handles x files well. Simple clean interface, easy to learn. There are some tutorials somewhere out there too.
http://www.insanesoftware.de/index.php?page=home.php

I use it.

try gmax

characterFX is nice, thanks for the hint.

anim8or is pretty neat

cant export...plus if u manage to, you break the eula (unless you bought a game pack licence)

blender is awesome

You can use 3D studio for animations. I'm not sure what file types are supported by default, but you can find lots of plug-ins for it to make it export to many file types.

Vote, +1 Blender