Shenku
RiO Incarnate
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Tuesday, June 11, 2013
MD3 files do not save bone data, at all. No skin data, no bone data, only the mesh data.
This is because the MD3 format saves animations by way of a Keyframed "3D screenshot" of vertex positions on the model, and stores each "screenshot" as an individual Keyframe for animation (Which the engine then interpolates using the animation.cfg file to know which animations are where). As a result, it discards all other data, because Bones aren't part of the mesh, and neither is the skinning data. They're just instructions on how to deform the mesh when you're animating, but that's it. The actual animations the MD3 format looks at are the meshes themselves.
If I'm reading what you want to do correctly, you're going to essentially have to do the animations over from scratch unless you can get the original 3DS source files that the MD3s were exported from. Try contacting the person who made the file, and see if they're willing to share the source files with you, otherwise, you'll have to re-skin and do the animations over.
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Shenku
RiO Incarnate
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Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Animating is fairly straight forward to do. Essentially, you treat the character model like an "action figure" and move its arms and limbs around to make him do something, using either Autokey or manually setting Keyframes to save each pose to a frame.
Good animations require a lot more than just that, which you can get an idea of from reading through the 12 Principles of Animation. Note that for Dragonball Z, some of the rules are sometimes ignored for the sake of Appeal, such as Anticipation(which is ignored almost entirely in some fights in the series). These principles apply to any form of animation too, not just cartoons.
For animating in 3DS Max, you may want to look over some basic tutorials, such as this one here to get an idea of what you need to do.
Above all, make sure you're having fun with it, or you'll get burned out, grow bored, and stop working on it. Start simple, and do some basic idle or walking animations before worrying about fighting animations. The worst thing you can do is try to do too much from the beginning, because you'll quickly get overwhelmed if you're idea is too overzealous, which will make you so frustrated you want to give up. Best to avoid that, and save the difficult stuff for when you're ready for it.
Goku wouldn't have been able to defeat Frieza in the Saiyan Saga after all, he had to train all the way through the Namek Saga to get to the point that he was ready to face him. The same applies to 3D Animations. It takes time to learn, before you're ready to do the crazy awesome stuff.
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