Don’t know about 4 but lightwave will do 1,2 and 3.
I do know you can export “motion” files from LW but I can’t tell you anything about what is in them etc.
gmax/3d studio probably also do 1,2 & 3 I would guess (not really familiar with them). I think gmax is a bit particular about 1 though (only uses gmax files for exporting?).
The big benefit of gmax over 3DStudio/LW is you don’t have to sell a kidney to own it (gmax is free in it’s basic form).
Of course these also Maya I guess (Mayas going rate is 2 kidneys isn’t it?). Theres a Maya “Learning” edition kicking around which might do something useful & is free (a version of it came on the 3rd disk of UT2003 - but I haven’t looked at it).
im not familiar with maya or lightwave since presently im completely satisfied with 3ds max (it provides skinning and vertex weighting functions and its not very complicated to write an exporterplugin to get this information into your own fileformat)
Blender (http://www.blender.org ) should be able to do the 4 steps, but you need to find export plugins for 4). Or you can program a Python plugin yourself to export in your desired file format.
thanks for your feedback
i also heard cal3d can do it, so now i’m wondering if it’s worth the effort or if i’d better go for 3ds and find/create an export plugin (darn how comes this is not already included in the package?)