I have created a simple 3D animation, which is a cube that is bobbing its head back and forth, and using Blender to export the animation into 3DS Max file format.

According to this link here, I have satisfied the first and second requirements, which are to use a file format (3DS Max file) that is saved as a binary file, and to create a 3DS file loader.

From here on, I couldn't follow the instructions. The respondent said to skin the weighted mesh by going through the vertex shader, does it mean I have to use GLSL to do animation by controlling the vertex and calculate the weight on the mesh? I even got more confused with the part that says to use the matrices that were included with the skins. But it got me thinking that maybe 3DS Max files have a file structure hierarchy that stores data useful for these.

I went to this site that teaches how to create a 3DS Max loader. There, it includes the following hierarchical file structure known.

MAIN CHUNK 0x4D4D
   3D EDITOR CHUNK 0x3D3D
      OBJECT BLOCK 0x4000
         TRIANGULAR MESH 0x4100
            VERTICES LIST 0x4110
            FACES DESCRIPTION 0x4120
               FACES MATERIAL 0x4130
            MAPPING COORDINATES LIST 0x4140
               SMOOTHING GROUP LIST 0x4150
            LOCAL COORDINATES SYSTEM 0x4160
         LIGHT 0x4600
            SPOTLIGHT 0x4610
         CAMERA 0x4700
      MATERIAL BLOCK 0xAFFF
         MATERIAL NAME 0xA000
         AMBIENT COLOR 0xA010
         DIFFUSE COLOR 0xA020
         SPECULAR COLOR 0xA030
         TEXTURE MAP 1 0xA200
         BUMP MAP 0xA230
         REFLECTION MAP 0xA220
         [SUB CHUNKS FOR EACH MAP]
            MAPPING FILENAME 0xA300
            MAPPING PARAMETERS 0xA351
      KEYFRAMER CHUNK 0xB000
         MESH INFORMATION BLOCK 0xB002
         SPOT LIGHT INFORMATION BLOCK 0xB007
         FRAMES (START AND END) 0xB008
            OBJECT NAME 0xB010
            OBJECT PIVOT POINT 0xB013
            POSITION TRACK 0xB020
            ROTATION TRACK 0xB021
            SCALE TRACK 0xB022
            HIERARCHY POSITION 0xB030

I saw that there is a chunk that store animation frames, which are probably keyframes that appears in Blender's Dopesheet. But the file structure didn't tell me where I can load (or read) matrices that is used to calculate the vertices when the animation is being played. Thus, I'm stucked.

1. What does the third requirement meant for me to do?

2. Are there examples / sample codes that loads 3DS Max files and animate the models in the program?

3. What else should I need to learn more about?

4. In GLSL, what parts should I learn more about when it comes to animation?

Thanks in advance.

I'm looking for the core basics of obtaining keyframes, how to use keyframes, obtaining data that does the animation calculations, and how to handle those data. If the information is available, where can I read more into these? Google searching doesn't seem to work for me. The art of Googling has not been passed down upon me.

Have you looked at assimp? http://assimp.sourceforge.net/

You can see how to use it here http://ogldev.atspace.co.uk/www/tutorial38/tutorial38.html