   DirectX 9 and Bones
  Hello, I am relatively new to DirectX 9. I have been scouring the internet in search of information about manipulating bones in DX, and I am still confused.  All that I have found out is that I need to setup a skinned model, but my google fu has failed me when it comes to setting one up.  Any information or resources anyone can provide would be great   
  Unless you're talking about .X file animation - and that's not really a good route to go these days, tool support and documentation for it is thin on the ground - then there isn't really any direct stuff for working with bones in Direct3D.A skeletal animation system's got two major components: firstly, working out what the bone positions/orientations are at any given time, based on which animations you're playing, etc; and secondly, rendering a model using that particular set of bone positions/orientations. The former is entirely separate to Direct3D; the latter is most commonly approached using techniques like Matrix Palette Skinning.   ;  If the .X format (which I was using) has lacking documentation, then what format should I use for my models?Also, I wanted to use the bones for both animation and to place a camera relative to a model.  Is there a better way to achieve either of those?   ;  There's a bunch of formats around; you should pick one that's most suitable for the 3D editor you're using.You can use bones to track points relative to a model, certainly - it makes little difference whether you're calculating the position of a vertex on the surface of the model, or the position of a prop you're attaching to the model, or the position of the camera.   ;  So I assume this means I will need to write my own loader for the model / bones / materials if I use another format?  There isn't a function in dx somewhere to get a bone by name or something from a .x model?   ;  You don't necessarily need to write your own loader - you look for a library to load models for you.   ;  Ok, I will look into those, but since I already have the code working for loading .X models (using the functions provided by D3DX9), I would also like to know if any functions are in D3DX9 are available to work with bones.   ;  Look into D3DXLoadMeshHierarchyFromX and the ID3DXAnimationController interface it gives you.   ;  Thank you for the help.   ;  I'm not a big fan of the .x file format, I reccommend using the .smd format (Half-Life simple mesh data file). It supports animation and multiple textures, and most modeling programs like 3dsmax/lightwave have plugins that import/export to .smd. the hard part is writing a model/bone loader since the vertices are in Z-X-Y order. If you would like a mesh loading example for .smd I could provide the function I use :D   