   importing bone data...which file format?
  Hi,I've always wondered which 3D file format has easy documentation about importing bone data.I've only coded 3DS loaders before, but I couldn't find any documentation dealing with how it stores bones and relevant data.Does anyone know any 3D file format that stores this information in an easy to load way? What do most people do to get this data for their games?Cheers,David :)   
  There are lots of tutorials and information for the Quake/Doom file formats (MD2/MD3/MD4/MD5). I'm sure 3/4/5 support bones and are quite easy to load.   ;  MD3 doesn't support bones, just to warn you. MD5 does, but if you want to do bone animation + skinning entirely on the GPU, you're better off going with something else. MD5's aren't really suitable for that.   ;  In addition to what others have already posted, MS3D's format stores bone information and is pretty trivial to parse. The X file format also stores bone information, but is not so trivial to parse (manually; using D3D you can use the D3DX library to do most of the heavy lifting).   ;  Thanks very much for the useful info!It's very interesting...Do most modern games do realtime bone/skinning animation? Or do they just use a set of precalculated frames of animation for the model? (I've only dealt with static models before).Thanks very much for all the info :)Its most appreciated! :);  They generally do skeletal animation at run time, either on the CPU or the GPU. Precalculating and storing all animation geometry (even just keyframes) is a huge space overhead and can look pretty icky.   ;  Awesome, thats what I was hoping :)Thanks very much!   ;  I use the MD5 format mostly, I found it quite easy to parse. And I do the skinning + animating on the CPU.   ;  is that because of limitations on the GPU? Just curious, since I've never had a go at this before.   ;  No, it's just that the layout of the data in MD5 files isn't really the best possible for GPU skinning.Which is probably as planned, since Doom3 wouldn't do any skinning on the GPU because they need the results for collision also.   