Hello, I am doing a math project and my main focus is computer graphics. I want to explore the mathematics behing interactive games, and right now I want to use free 3D models on the web and somehow code it to do an animation whenever I press a button. Ex. Space bar makes the model jump in the air. I was just wondering if OpenGL would be able to perform my this task, and if yes can you please direct me to tutorials on how to do this. Thank you.
Interactive Animation Help (Beginnger)
Yes, you can animate models with opengl (though, generally, most of the "animation" doesn't involve opengl at all, but whatever language you're coding in, opengl just renders it). A couple online resources I found helpful are here and here, though there are certainly others. Depending on whether you want to animate via key-frames, pre-animated models with bone-rigging (where you may have a jump/run/whatever animation and simply select which is animated) or whether you want interactive animation (where you rely a little more on physics and move the bone rig independently) you may need to either learn to animate in blender/maya or whatever modeling program you use, or find open-asset models that come with animations.
It's a rather involved process (I personally found it extremely difficult), however you go about it, but good luck! .
My main collaborator, Sergey Butylkov, is currently adding skeletal animation using md5mesh.
Here are some links about SimpleScene..
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/798054/SimpleScene-d-scene-manager-in-Csharp-and-OpenTK
https://github.com/jeske/SimpleScene
If you want to "do it yourself"... Start with OpenGL tutorials, then once you have a 3d renderer, you can learn about skeletal animation.
http://ogldev.atspace.co.uk/index.html
http://3dgep.com/loading-and-animating-md5-models-with-opengl/