animation software that exports to .X format

You could try trueSpace. It's a nice piece of software that's unfortunately dead (after Microsoft bought it, made it free and then killed it). It works with the X format, but not perfectly, and I have no idea if it'd work for your purposes, but it won't hurt to try it. It's a pretty decent modeller.

That said, if you've written your own loader anyway, why not for a format that software can actually export?

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That said, if you've written your own loader anyway, why not for a format that software can actually export?

whats currently the best format out there for storing a skinned mesh + animation data. I though this would be 3ds until I found out that it only really supports static meshes.

Unfortunately, right now there isn't one format that is "the best". I've run into the problem of finding an appropriate format before. It's not easy. From what I understand, the "md5" format has nice animation support and export plugins for a good number of modeling tools, including Blender. I ultimately chose to stick with the "x" format, based on the tutorial here on GameDev, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it though.

Edit: I haven't gotten to try ASSIMP, but I certainly like the concept of not having to worry about formats...

[Edited by - kloffy on July 4, 2009 5:57:02 AM]

Blender can export to .X files, and it's free. But just for completeness: about any other 3D modelling package can export to .X, as well. It's just that you usually need a plugin for the job - the built-in exporters, if any, are usually not up to the task.

Beware, though: You usually have to add a few workarounds to your loader whenever you try to load files written by a new exporter. I'm one of the authors of the aforementioned ASSIMP library, and I added quite a few fixes for reading xfiles from Blender. For example, prepare to find "1.#IND00" and "1.#QNAN0" literals mixed into the data.

That's also the reason why I usually suggest using a ready-made solution such as the Assimp library - but I concede that it is rather large for loading a single file format. But you get alot of postprocessing along with it for free, and it's already tested against a lot of exporters.

I like the look of the md5 format, pretty simple compared to .X and it exports from blender perfectly. I'll write another loader for this. The only two problems that I see are that it doesn't allow you to scale bones for key frames and that it only lets you assign textures to mesh data and no colors etc. but these are quite minor problems.

Use blender :) www.blender.org. It's free and it exports into several Game formats such as fbx, x, md2, obj, and more.

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Original post by Game_Coder2009 Use blender :) www.blender.org. It's free and it exports into several Game formats such as fbx, x, md2, obj, and more.

been using blender for quite a while now :)

FBX seems like its becoming the defacto "universal" format.