Concerning models

I’m working on a project at the moment that is going to [obviously] have models in it, nothing fancy but looking to do something like standing animation/walking animation/etc. As of now, I’ve been able to read .ase files into my project… that’s fine and dandy for stills; but I have realized that using the ase format for ANYTHING but stills is going to be very costly in memory [both ram and hdd], and probably not the fastest thing around.

I’m just looking to hear what you all have to say regarding this, is going with a model format that supports the whole ‘bone’ scheme a good idea ? I’m looking for only maybe ~32 ‘frames’ per character, so it sounds as if it might be overboard. Is there a format that could be exported from 3dsmax/maya, where I could read it in and have several frames to flip between ? What is a good solution to this?

Also, I’d like to know what this means from a modelling standpoint. Is doing things one way much less taxing on an artist than another? What have your personal experiences been?

Thanks a lot in advance guys, this forum has really helped me get a great grasp on using GL effectively, and I’m sure this won’t be an exception.

-oliver

.3ds files can contain keyframes for animation, and are exportable from 3dsmax, as well as other modelling packages.

There are numerous threads both here and in the advanced forums, do a search on .3ds to find them.

And here are a couple links:
http://www.gametutorials.com
http://lib3ds.sourceforge.net/

You might also want to look into Quake model files: md2, md3 and md4 files. I can’t quite remember the details of each of them, but some formats support keyframe animation and some support skeletal animation. Also, they’re specifically built for performance by people that know AND they were design with opengl in mind.

There’s a virtual ton of info out there on these file formats, and of course, all of id software’s stuff is open source - you can get info right from the horse’s mouth. Conversion to/from common 3d file formats should also be pretty easy.