I decided recently that I need to get the hang of 3D modelling, so I spent about two hours today building the above body shape for practice. It isn't going to win me any awards, but it is a lot better than any previous attempts I've made and I've learned quite a lot about Milkshape in the process.

I don't ever intend to get great at this, but if I could get my "programmer modelling" up to the same level as my "programmer art", it would open up a lot of possibilities.

Plus I bought my Milkshape license about a year ago and have barely used it.

[EDIT]



Hour or so later, thumbs and head added and a half-arsed attempt at texturing.

[EDIT]



Suprisingly, rigging up a skeleton was pretty trivial after actually making and texturing the model.

Above is the same model in a different pose.

Funny - been trying to crack this stuff for literally over a year now, but it all sort of finally came together today.

Next job is to try to make a simpler model that will actually look nice and define some keyframe animations.

[EDIT]

Since it only appears you can store or export one animation per model file, I don't think any of the existing formats are going to do me, plus I've always enjoyed messing about with my own file formats.

I'm currently messing about writing a MilkShape exporter, which is proving fairly easy so far. I've got a basic DLL working that is correctly showing in the MilkShape export menu and, when clicked, just puts up a message box with the number of model groups.

Some documentation would have been nice, but it is pretty easy so far to figure out what is what from the msLib.h file.

I'll keep using the default MilkShape format to store models etc and just write exporters I think as I reckon that is a bit simpler than writing an importer.