Attempting to convert a model with "bones" - how to find the coordinates of each rotation point? I should explain that I've only just downloaded and installed blender maybe a week ago? There is a model I am going to use for a project and I have to convert it to a special format for the engine I'm using. It doesn't support bones or any rigging. To actually do rigging I apply a transformation to the drawing space according to where the model should be (for instance, move a submodel so that its rotation point is at the origin, rotate, and then move back and then do whatever transformations were applied to higher models in the hierarchy). So I do have the models themselves (the geometry and textures) converted into the proper format. That I do not need help with. I have another program for that but it only views polygon data (for the same reasons as above). I'm trying to determine those "rotation points" in blender. I have no idea how to use the interface. I figured out how to load the model in the window last night and I managed to delete some stupid cube that was sitting in the default window. I'm essentially wanting to know what menu or what button (preferably with screenshots) I go to in order to step through all the rotation points one by one so that I can convert it to my setup?

It is quite possible that my setup is slightly different than how bones work. I apologize if so. It's how I've thought about for quite some time when dealing with models. Hopefully it isn't too confusing for you people who have used Blender for more than a few hours.



For those asking what engine I'm using. It is game maker 8.0 pro. Yes I have read the manual thoroughly. It does not support bones. No, I cannot convert the codebase to something else as it is literally years old. No, I would prefer to not use a 3rd party library to load in the original model with its default rigging.
With the armature selected switch to Edit Mode, select the bone you want, and the location of the point it rotates around is displayed in the Properties panel (N) under Head:



To automate this open a Text Editor window and run this code:

import bpy

obj = bpy.context.active_object

if obj.mode is not 'OBJECT': bpy.ops.object.set_object_mode()

for bone in obj.data.bones:
    print("Bone: {0} origin is at {1}".format(bone.name, bone.head))


It will output into System Console. You can rewrite it to output to a file in a custom format your engine will understand.

The values will be relative to the armature centre of origin and with Z axis pointing up.