Well! (Where I am at is later, first I will explain my absence and OP) Firstly I have started a new thread instead of the below 3D horses thread as it seems to have diverted somewhat from my original Post. Anyway. Guys thanks to everyone who did post, sadly I had to make a damn MySQL PHP system, so got sidetracked, however I am back on it and into it now. I am not a newbie, but i am no expert at 3D either. Let me refine my task... I am making a 3D race simulater, which you can thing of as a demonstration of a games programmers simple understanding and willingness to learn the Art of 3D modelng. However as someone may be pleased to hear i aim to make it realistic to a degree. By this I hope to not slow horses velocites down,and still have them animated at the same speed, and other like elements. So where am I ? I have a 3D world , pretty basic , just a flat ground terrain to be honest. I need to figure out how to add a track, and The Horse AI to run arround it without colliding? A* path finding perhaps? The Horse you cry ? Well I was lucky enough to recieve a simple Horse Mesh for 3D studio from a generous member. However I then never looked at the post as it went of track. However I manged to get it exported to an X file, and loaded into my world, all be it with problems and perhaps some bugs? I have now added studied hard at 3D max, and have added Bones and IK solvers, and am playing with my animations as i speak based on Eadweard Muybridge studies. Goals, I aim to be able to pass information from a recalculated race program using elements such as jockey, talent weight and style. Horse, Fitness, Style, type(Bay , chestnut etc), Size, form. Track, Going, length . From this I need to get a race to run the same each time, from the same data. So i need to handle horses blocking and overtaking in a consistant maner, aswell as late runs etc. Just the results been the same is not enough hmmm. A thinka?! now for advice ! S1CA you spoke of splines for the horses to follow?Could you explain anymore mate? Is it best to play with creating an animation in Max, then importing it to Direct X. Or export individual X files as frames and then i can load them in 1 by 1 and control them myself with my code? I think i can do the later at the moment, as i have a mesh.h to load x files, but not animated files. I also have several sounds at hand ready to use. Again thanks to all and the the moderator for helping simulate such intrest and help for my project. BlackEye. Please feel free to email if anyone else needs help getting to where i am at now.

Sounds like mario cart with horses. You do not need the AI to use A* or any path finding, because the course is set. You just need a sequence of endpoints connected by splines. The splines dictate how the ai interpolates its position as it moves from one endpoint to the next. To add a little variation, the ai for each player can deviate slighly from the path by fixed amount and might also vary to pass obstacles and other players. You can just calculate the heading vector from the next position minus the current position and vary distance from the spline along the perpendicular vector. Horses need to check that they do not get too close to other horses. They should also jump or go around any obstacles that might be in the spline path.

As for rerunning each race, you need to get and save a random number seed for each race. You then seed the random generator with this number and run the race algorithm. As long as the calls are made to the random number function with the same seed in the same order, the results will be exactly the same.

ok bishop,

I was working on my jockey yesterday, and yes they are animated. Now my original goal was for flat races, but if i can get my horse model working as i hope, i see no reason i carnt play with jumping. In which case it would be nice to have the jockey perhaps fall of. This is the icing on the cake and somehting i would look at a little later on. However for now the jockey is animated and will use the whip, which i hope to be linked to data given, and not just a randomn occurence which sees no response from the horse.

Horse markings / Mesh,

Ok here is my Mesh
http://www.2ndchancegames.co.uk/HorseMesh.jpg
And my current Bones system
http://www.2ndchancegames.co.uk/HorseBones.jpg

I made a running model, but it messed up a little, and i have issues from exporting from 3DS to X files and the textures? As it seems to be able to import ok in my DX engine, but without textures? I''ll fix it

Indiviual markings would be a lovely touch, again however, I have to get the basics working first. You are welcome to get involved if you wish, as you seem to feel quite passionate about this

This is a non - commercial project, and one i am using to learn and act as a demo of my 3D modeling knowlege along with a a 2D football game I am making, to get a job for a computer games company.

yup, really nice mesh, well done
superpig> I guess it''s the eyeballs and wireframe display that make those "overly rounded" eyes... assuming he modeled eyelids it should look alright