low polygon character animation - how to?

Engines, Libraries and Tools Java 3D
#1

Hello,

I would like to animate very simple “extremely-low-polygon” character models (they will be rendered using custom software renderer). In other words, I need something very similar to what Runescape 2 has ( please don’t stop reading:) )

I don’t want to re-invent the wheel so I think that the best way to achieve it is to model and animate the characters in some existing modeler, store the animation in some popular format, and then convert it to my internal format.

The question is, which modeler (and file format) would you use? I’m not very familiar with character modeling software (and file formats which support bone animation), but my current ideas are:

  • to use quake 3 file format. I believe that there exist many editors which can edit these models (if you know some good and suitable for my purpose please mention it)
  • I saw software named Poser, it seems to be able to edit & animate characters and export them to various format
  • probably almost every major commercial 3d software has some support for character modeling (though I’m not sure whether it is suitable for my purposes)

any other suggestion regarding file format & editor (which supports bone character animation) ?

thank you

#2

Milkshape is cheap and imports/exports to about a bagillion file formats (one of which is q2 and q3 model formats). Aimed at low poly character work and does skeletanal animation (although it’s a little non-intuitive at first). Or theres Blender, which is free but has a hideous interface.

#3

Poser is nice for human animations. Thats basically what it does.

At this point most of the serious commercial packages contain similar tools. The #1 most used professional tool for this is Maya, but it aint cheap.