Hi all! I have a quick question - the answer is the the last remaining information I need for me to feel I have a good understanding of this Skeletal Animation milarky! Could someone please describe to me how the reference rotations / positions are generated by Milkshape? I'm talking about the data that can be retrieved using msBone_GetRotation(). I know few things about this data - I know that each is relative to the parent bone to which it belongs... I originally assumed that this rotation described how to get from a bone 'looking' in to the Z axis, to 'point' to the position of its child bone. This can't be right, as a bone may have multiple children, and can't 'point' to all of them! I did a test, whereby I created 2 bones, the first at 0,0,0 and the second, directly above it at 0,20,0. The rotation data for the first bone comes out as something like "-1.5707964, 1.5707963, 0.0", and the second at "0,0,0". I haven't yet made sense of these results in my own mind Could someone please take the time to explain to me the basics of how these original reference rotations/positions are generated? Thanks in advance!! Dachande

the animation expoeted by milkshape is very straightforward as of any other software. It exports the bone information as well as the complete animation. I would recommend you to goto rsn.gamedev.net and check out the tutorial out there. It gives you a good overview of skeletal animation wrt Milkshape3D.
Hope this helps!

Hi again -

I just want to clarify my question :) I have in fact already created 90% of the code to perform skeletal animation.

I want to have some sort of understanding about the whole animation process, not just the bit you get to read about in tutorials (read data from model file, rotate it, etc etc) - I don't want to claim I know how skeletal animation works without knowing how the data I'm reading from the file is created. This data seems to be taken for granted!

I read the relative rotation for a root bone at position 0,0,0 - and get Euler angles of -1.5,1.5,0 (in radions). This result does not make sense to me! I'd like to know how these original reference rotations are decided upon.

Thanks!

Dachande