I’m searching for a simple to read fileformat that supports keyframes. I know 3DS does support them, but there Transformation is crappy!
I am searching for a file-format that store the animated vertices as simple positions (+normals and if possible color) with timeindices.
I suspect MD2 is supporting this features but I want to use objects and animations
that are created in 3D-Max.
I think I need a description of a simple format. And if necessary a converter from a exportable 3D-Max format to an other.
If you’re creating 3DS files in 3DSMax, you can just use their SDK to export the data they have (splines and everything if you want) into whatever format you prefer.
MD2 just stores full mesh vertex positions, for over 60 meshes (for the different animation cycles). That makes them quite big, even though they quantize everything to bytes.
If you for some reason have 3DS files without Max or the SDK, you’ll have to check out www.wotsit.org and do some reverse engineering on the files using a hex editor, and write your own importer. Fun week-end project.
It comes with 3dsmax. But as far as I know its also available from Kinetix/Decreet ftp. if you dont own a copy of 3dsmax you can still write an exporter plugin but you can’t use it so its rather useless if you dont have 3dsmax