Skinning solutions and body animation

[Ingemar]

I am looking for advice on methods, code and model formats suitable to do body animations with skinning.

I know how skinning works, and I could implement it from scratch (I have even authored a student lab on skinning), but time is limited so I would like to avoid detours on not-so-good formats, and if there is good (modern) code around then it would be wise not to miss it. I fear that what I know is aging and I want to be updated.

Let's say, what is the current state on the subject? How do you work on body animation?

[User137]

My game engine is actually not that far yet to do bone based animation, but i know little about formats:
OBJ: Does support multiple objects and textures but no frames or bones.
MS3D(Milkshape3D): Propably supports it all but the format itself is weird. There is binary and ASCII versions, and i suppose different versions for the binary.
3DS: One of the most popular ones to support all. If you find a good model reader for this you can do alot.

Then there is also formats from other games like HalfLife 1 and 2, and Quake, was it MD2 and MD3 which had i guess compact bone animation format for gaming. I'm not sure how much Unreal-engines format is used, but graphics and models in their games are outstanding.

[Ingemar]

AFAIK MD2 and MD3 are a bit too old-fashioned these days. OBJ is nice for rigid objects but no animation data.

3DS is popular, no doubt about that. How about Collada, B3D? Any nice loaders/renderers around?

[AirPas]

xproger wrote an excellent tutorial about that http://xproger.mentalx.org/old/?id=1&page=2&doc=anim3d

you will find also a source code + 3DS max exporter

i personally used it

[Stoney]

While I never wrote my own model loader, when I used Unity3D and Horde3D I generally used Collada (and sometimes FBX in Unity) and I was really satisfied with it.
Collada shouldn't be too difficult to parse, since it's just a big XML file. But I don't think there are any Collada loader written in Pascal though.
There is also Restless, a model loader and format written in Pascal with a Blender exporter and it should support everything you for looking for. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get it working properly on Mac OS X as of yet. (Compiling the dynamic library works with some added compiler defines, but somehow it crashes in the example application.)

[Ingemar]

Collada shouldn't be too difficult to parse, since it's just a big XML file. But I don't think there are any Collada loader written in Pascal though.

On the negative side, I understand that Collada is a very complex format so writing that loader might take a lot of time.

There is also Restless, a model loader and format written in Pascal with a Blender exporter and it should support everything you for looking for. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get it working properly on Mac OS X as of yet. (Compiling the dynamic library works with some added compiler defines, but somehow it crashes in the example application.)

As you say, the library compiles with a few tweaks (Delphi mode + replacing dglOpenGL by GL + GLext), which is a very good sign. Most packages I find that are written for Delphi tend to be littered with dependencies and Win32 calls, so I am happy that that wasn't the case here.

So now I can try a demo though the debugger and see what happens.