   Animation sets - conversion from 3ds COLLADA
  I have a pipeline now which takes 3ds Max DAE (COLLADA) files and converts them to a binary format which my engine loads.  I've incorporated skinning and skeletons which converts the 3ds model and loads it, restoring the bones and skeleton to their original state.  Everything's working fine.My question lies in animation.  This might be the wrong forum but when you design, say, a character in 3ds Max and a suite of animations, e.g. run, walk, shoot, etc., shouldn't these animations get stored with the one model file?  From what I've seen of 3ds Max so far, there doesn't appear to be any way of setting up and differentiating between animation sets other than using Animation Layers which I've found both fiddly and a bit buggy.I suppose the reason this post is in this forum is more to do with how I convert and load these objects into the engine.  It seems I might have to save multiple copies of my 3ds character along with each animation set and splice them all together in my converter only using one version of the mesh (the mesh gets exported with each file).  That doesn't sound right to me, I was expecting to see something along the lines of:<mesh>...</mesh><controller>...</controller><animation>  <set="walk"....>  <per bone animations>  </set>  <set="shoot"....>  <per bone animations>  </set></animation>'Walk', 'Shoot', etc, being names of layers or whatever is used to differentiate animation sequences.  When what you actually get is more like:<mesh>...</mesh><controller>...</controller><animation>  <bone1 animations>  <bone2 animations>  <etc></animation>Has anyone had any experience with this kind of thing who can shed some light on a more elegant solution?Apologies if this is the wrong forum, moderators, feel free to move it.Thanks   
Quote:Original post by RobMaddisonHas anyone had any experience with this kind of thing who can shed some light on a more elegant solution?I use blender and collada to convert animations into my own binary format. I have one blender file for each animated mesh including all animtions (walking, shootingn etc.). The only trick I do is to create one animation with hundreds of frames and assign frame ranges to an animation. I.e. my blender file contains 300 frames, my converter assigns frame 0-100 to walking, 101-200 to shooting etc.It is not a more elegant solution, but atleast it is easy to handle :-);  Thanks for the post, that sounds like a good approach to me.  I've decided to split the mesh and skeleton from the animation clips which means each animation clip has its own binary file.  This also means I'll be able to stream separate animations fairly easily too which is what I was after.   