Hi all.
Having problems with my 3DS loader, I’m considering moving to another format.
According to severeal people, 3ds doesn’t handle bones which is harmful given my 3D designers use bones…
I’m looking for an open source format that handles bones animations and can manage many vertices and triangles (much more than md2).
Waiting for your opinions and arguments 
md5 ?
Collada is an open format that supports bones and many other things. I think it is the best choice for an interchange format (Not yet supported by Blender but most other modelling software do support it).
Cal3D is specialized in skeletal animation. It is fairly limited but it is easier to load and theere used to be a plugin for Blender export (broken in 2.42, hopped it has been fixed).
MD5 (and MD4) supports skeletal animation but it is fairly specialized and there aren’t many exporters. It can be added that this file format is not that well adapted to GPU skinning (i.e. data are organized to be processed by the CPU not the GPU albeit it can be done).
This info from xith3d.org worked for me…using cal3d with blender
http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/soya/trunk/soya/blender2cal3d.py
It needs the following modifications : 1. Remove the # -- indent-tabs-mode: t -- line and the next empty line. The file MUST begin with #!BPY 2. Change “XML=1” to “XML=0”