Hello!
I have a goal to model a character in a modelling tool, and then animate this model using jogl. For starters, I have created a small API that represents a skeleton which is made up of joints. With this API I can do basic joint manipulation (Ive also looked at odejava, but this seems a bit complicated for the moment). The joint API ive created works fine, its basically an unbalanced tree with joint objects as nodes, where i can rotate a joint, and all the children of the rotated joint will rotate in the same direction and so on. Alright, now I want to add a model around this skeleton, but this is worse then I initially imagined. Manipulating the skeleton is one thing, but manupulating the imported model with the skeleton is a whole different thing… Like, how would you know which part of the model to manipulate for each joint?
So I was wondering if some of you have any ideas regarding different modellers where models, skeletons and joints can be created, so that they can be animated using jogl. I have some experience in Milkshape 3D and Studio max, but my knowledge here is pretty basic. I know that in milkshape you could animate characters using joints and stuff, but this is rather “static”, I would rather want to manupulate the model in code any way i wanted (Like rotate joints any way I want and so on). Thats why I was wondering if some of you know of any modelling tools where you can create a model and a skeleton, then import this model and manipulate the model using jogl? Or is this very, very complicated? Is my thinking wrong here, for example, would it be easier to split the character into different parts, and then assign each part its own joint/bone?
Since Im mostly working in linux, how would something like blender work for this purpose, if anybody has experience with blender?
Thank you!
