Skeleton-based model format

Hi,

I’m looking for a format to use for my game, but I don’t seem to find much around that’s really usable…
I want FK (and IK eventually), vertex weighing (more than 1) etc…

None of the game-formats like md3 or mdl are apropiate, ASE/OBJ doesn’t export bones…

It seems I have to write my own exporter, but I just found Flexporter, which seems cool.

Any thoughts on what I should use?

Thanks.

How bout ms3d?
http://milkshape3d.com/

Hmm ms3d would be okay I guess, but it only supports one bone per vertex… And I haven’t seen any max exporters for it.

md5 perhaps. Search on this forum, you will find one post where the algorithm is explained for generating the vertices, which in itself is interesting.

I would like to know if there are officially released specs on the md2, md3, md4, and md5 format.

I myself am interested in a good model format.

Someone has created AME (search this forum), I dont know if it supports bones. The down side is it’s in text mode.

md5 is ascii, too… No official specs have been released, to my knowledge…
AME? Okay I’ll search for that… Wierd there isn’t something like this out though…
I’m goofing around with flexporter, I think that may be a good choice.

Personally, I would hold off on MD5 until DOOM 3 is actually released.

Yeah I would, too… I don’t want to use that, but SOMETHING!! …

Sounds like you need to write a plugin for your modeller of choice.

Half-life .mdl files support skeletons. Unfortunately, they only weight each vert to a single bone, so they don’t look that great, but it’s a good source of data to quickly get things up and running.

There’s about a zillion copies of .mdl model viewers out there, in source, too; almost all of them are built on the official sample half-life mdl file loader/renderer code.