Character Animation

I havn't really messed with bone heigharchies but i have done keyframing and vertex animation.


Basic Vertex keyframe format:

uint uiTotalVerts;
uint uiTotalTriangles;

triangle vTriangles[];

uint uiTotalAnimations;

char szAnimationName[255];
uint uiTotalKeyFrames
vertex vKeyFrameData[];

// ... do that for how ever many animations you have

You can load in the triangle array that indexes into the vertex array to render the mesh. Than you have multiple vertex arrays for each keyframe. The animation system can interpolate from keyframe to keyframe from there.

thats what I thought keyframing would be like to be honest... i really want to learn how to implement bone hierarchies though :l not finding really ANY info on it.. thanks for answering tho i was starting to think nobody cared :(

Look at the .X format in the DirectX SDK. In fact, in the media folder look at tiny.x (should be the girl using the walk cycle). Look for the section that begins with AnimationKey. This will be the animation's entire keyframe sequence for a single bone. So at keyframe 80, for example, the file will contain this info:
80;16;0.000000,1.000000,-0.000000,0.000000,-1.000000,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,1.000000,0.000000,27.423260,34.577141,-0.000001,1.000000;;,

which is probably a rotation matrix and an offset from the parent bone (or an absolute position not for sure).

Also, keyframe animation can be stored in f-curves and tangent weights which reduces the amount of info you have to store.

Circlesoft's DirectMesh2 specification deals with defining a format for animated meshes from scratch. It's a very interesting read if you're interested in how this information can be stored in files and how it can be rendered.

This article explains skeletal anim and loads milkshape models.
http://rsn.gamedev.net/tutorials/ms3danim.asp
I found it quite usefull.

thanks for the directmesh2 link, its very interesting. thanks for the demo as well.