It took me about 20 minutes to get a hacked in animated character (that completely bypassed my entire rendering architecture), and now I'm working on actually making it conform to the architecture; here's the first thing I saw when I compiled:
This is actually better than I expected, I expected my computer to die a horrible death, but instead I got that! So it's all good, it just means somewhere the data is getting read or written incorrectly and it's jacking up the indices, or the vertices. Shouldn't be too bad to figure out.
Alright, I'm going to keep at it because it's pretty exciting.
Cool, just a few minutes after writing this post I found my error, I forgot to account for the index buffer stride, so after quickly fixing that:
Now, I know that looks weird, but, that's just because I have only converted the geometry over, I completely ignored all the transforms, so every "submesh" is being drawn at the origin (everything has the identity matrix as its transform), so now, it's only a matter of getting the right transforms for each submesh, then I'll have to also get the frame data for the animations and get the bone information as well.
If all goes well, I'll have an untextured, skeletal animated model tomorrow, making it textured is the easiest part, all I need to do is load the textures into the manager and save the handle in the submesh's material, it's so easy, I'll leave it for last.