Quote:
Originally Posted by Ham
The importer does not support bones in AC3D (Well, because AC3D doesn't support bones yet),
but textures and polys are working fantastic
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Is iGame3D yours? Nifty!
FWIW, don't know if this is helpful for you, but my company's engine needs bone data in its models, too. I extract this from AC3D by using the hierarchy setup and pivot points as bones. As long as you assume everything is at zero rotation (which is typical for neutral poses anyway) then it works quite well.
XPlane seems to do something similar, but they were really clever and let you assign an axis by attaching a polyline so you can store rotations, too.
For skinning information, I have two modes: For the first mode, I assign vertex weights based on overlapping vertices, so if you have an thigh and a shin and the vertices overlap at the knee, I merge that into one vertex with 50% skin weight for the thigh matrix and 50% for the shin matrix. I allow up to four bones per vertex and 256 bones per model. The second mode, the artist names a texture map in the object properties and uses that as a weight map; I just read the bone weights out of the texture.
Of course, this only gets you the rig--you still need another program if you need keyframes--but for a lot of objects like cars, weapons, ragdolls and other physics-based or procedurally animated models, the rig is all you need.