Skeletal animation - one skeleton for all the meshes?

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I remember when creating models for Half Life 1 that there was only ONE base skeleton which you attached the mesh to. This way you did not have to worry about animating each model but have each model use the same animation data provided by the skeleton.

Now my question: Is something similiar possible in Irrlicht?

When I read about (skeletal) animation with Irrlicht I could only find examples which were loading an .X or .ms3d file and animating the mesh based on the animation data within this file. But I want it so that I only read in the mesh data of several models (and probably the data about which vertexes are connected to which bones) and only load ONE file containing the actual animation data. Since all of my game's protagonists will share a similiar outward appearance(humanoid shape)
it would be nice if they could also share their animations^^

Thanks in advance,

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[ThommyE]

.. you can work around this problem using milkshape.
create your skeleton,animate it and save the whole thing as smd-animation vor halflive.
now you can create several meshes and just import the skeleton, assign the bones and you will have the animation=).
not that much additional work.

but i would also like to have mesh and skeleton seperated..best would be if you can splitt the skeleton so body/legs can play different animations at the same time without strange workaorunds^^

[elander]

This is important for blending and sharing animations. I think there should be an AnimationData class that can be loaded separately and can be freely linked to animated meshes.

[Cancel]

Thx you two! I gotta look a little deeper in irrlicht's documentation i guess
If that does't work I'll try to use SMD-Format ^^