   What 3D model meets my necessity?
  I'm looking for a 3D model for my graphics engine right now. I need an animated and static 3D model.I know nothing about 3D models so I guess what I need so far is a model with bones. Not the md2 format that has those interpolation. For the static model.. Which format is good for me? I want to have a world like Battlefield or maybe Call of Duty. hahahaI have 3ds Max right now. Is 3ds model any good?Thank youJohn Stuart   
  I assume you mean model format. For games like Battlefield studios have their own internal model format that is developed in-house and has integrated plugins for tools such as max and maya. Either that or they have a toolchain that converts an existing format to their own.I wouldn't recommend this for you and i would go with something like OBJ or .X. If you are working with Direct3D you can get away with .X files for most stuff.   ;  Yes. What I meant was model format. Sorry. :DDoes that model format supports bones? I looked that here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obj but didn't saw one.What I knew was Obj is for static objects only. Is it true?Thank youJohn Stuart   ;  OBJ does not support bones.   ;  Oh too bad. :(How about Collada? Their feature list was so huge. It might be a good model format. What I just don't understand is that loading it will requires you to use their library or something which I don't really understand.   ;  Loading collada doesn't require you to use their library.  Collada is an open standard developed so that 3d art assets could be easily moved between different 3d art programs.  It is an XML format so some sort of XML library would make dealing with it easier.   ;Quote:Original post by John StuartOh too bad. :(How about Collada? Their feature list was so huge. It might be a good model format. What I just don't understand is that loading it will requires you to use their library or something which I don't really understand.Collada is moderately complex to parse (ColladaDOM or FCollada are common choices to parse it). I think right now your best bet is probably .md5. It supports skeletal animation and it is easy to write an importer/exporter for it. Plus there are exporters for 3dsmax and maya.http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/MD5_(file_format)   ;  Today's resource file formats are so much more than just vertex data.Whatever format you decide on needs to be capable of allowing you to bake in lots of additional data such as:* discrete LOD* collision information* ragdoll information* u,v animation* particle effect data* advanced texturing information (multi-texturing, environment mapping, etc* shadow volumes* occlusion and culling information* bounding data* AI nav points* light sources and colors* material information* morph targets for model customization* mount points* spline data* and even more...A lot of this can be had with the basic scene graph and custom node format, but it can take some work to adapt that to the diversity of what you need to store.   ;  Note that using collada as raw input to your game might not be a good idea due to the complexity (loading speed). Normally when I hear of collada it is used as an intermediate step between modeling engines and a custom quick to load binary format.If you use any large collada files in your engine you're going to get tired of 15 second wait times every time you start the game.   ;  I tried md5 few years ago though. It was use on my first engine by the way. Now, that I'm planning to rewrite it.. well not really rewrite everything just a few optimization, I thought that I might need to have a new model format that is currently in today's time.Are you trying to say that I can use Collada but I should create a tool first that fetches all the required information for my engine and save it as a binary file?Did I understand it correctly?Thank youJohn Stuart   