figuring out md3 character animation

[harntour]

hello, i'm interested in learning md3 character animation.

i've taken a look at beret's blend file and it seems that the model is composes of three seperate sections. legs, torso/arms and head, but his amination.cfg file seems to control the animation of all three parts.

does that mean that the torso/arms and the legs have their own bones and rigging? or do they share the same skeleton?

does that mean that if the animation.cfg file assigns a certain range of frame numbers to a certain action then the same numbers have to be used in both the torso/arm model and the leg model?

so does that mean that if a sequence like running is assigned to frames 20-25 (for example) in the legs and the arms aren't involved in the animation then the arm model has to keep frames 20-25 unused?

thanks for your time.

[harntour]

i've been looking at the models in the svn some more an i've noticed that some of them have a complete model and some have the model broken down and moved around.

i'm guessing that the reason the parts are moved are so that their object centres are on 0,0,0. this looks a bit weird when you see the head poking out of the stomach, but it does make sense. it seems like the relevant parts of the skeleton are also seperated and moved at the same time. so i'm guessing the development of the model goes something like this-

1. rig and animate the model. check the animations look right.

2. split the skeleton into two sections. torso/arms and legs.

3. split the model into the three sections, head, torso/arms and legs.

4. select a point where the torso and legs meet and move both models' object centres to this point.

5. put the head's object centre at the bottom of it's model.

4. move the torso/arms model and it's skeleton so that the object centre is at 0,0,0

5. move the legs model and it's skeleton so that the object centre is at 0,0,0

6. move the head model so that the object centre is at 0,0,0

7. export each model to an md3 file

is that how it works?

[fromhell]

1. Model the thing
2. Uvmap the thing
3. Split the thing in 3
4. Make tags, repeated trial and error exports to fix scaling issues and tag rotation issues
5. Make skeletons and start animating
6. Skin time (since we've got the model in the game we can have the skin done last for avoiding unforeseen lighting conditions and such)

[harntour]

brilliant. thanks for your help.