Animation

Well, its not exactly opengl related, but how does quake animate its models? Simple animation like moving a ship is easy, but if there are lots of movements involved, like a human animation, how do most game handle it?

In games like quake each possible position that a model can take is rendered in a program like 3d studio max and then these frames of animation are just called in the correct order to simulate the desired motion. In games like quake each model can have hundreds of these frames of animation for each model.

Ah, just what I thought… thanks for your help. If thats the case, I think it would really be interesting to know the format of 3d studio max file.

Originally posted by ribblem:
In games like quake each possible position that a model can take is rendered in a program like 3d studio max and then these frames of animation are just called in the correct order to simulate the desired motion. In games like quake each model can have hundreds of these frames of animation for each model.

Well, you don’t store EVERY possible position. You store a set of keyframes and interpolate vertex positions between them.

It’s possible to do it by transforming limbs etc separately (e.g. Tomb Raider) but this causes geometry and texture tearing and isn’t used so much these days.