Is it possible to use x3d to get animations into Blender?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello,

I’m currently doing C coding to generate animations. I’m happy enough with vectors and matrices and I can use these to create a text file containing xyz and rotation information. What I’d like to do is get this into Blender somehow. X3D would be nice to work with because it is xml and pretty well known. I’d like to have my program generate an X3D file that would contain a load of bones and their positions and rotation for a certain number of frames. I’m not interested in meshes, just bones.

As I’ll be generating my own animations outside of Blender I’m not too concerned about Blender’s ability to export animations to X3D, which is just as well as it doesn’t seem to work. Sadly this means I cannot test the import function either since I’m unable to make test files to import. I know there are demo files out there for X3D animation but those will probably contain meshes too, which needlessly complicates things.

I’m hoping someone on this forum might be able to make a simple X3D file containing just bones and their animations, perhaps with a different program. This would allow me to study how it works and then hopefully use that in my code.

Anyone here able to make this for me?

Thanks.

2

The main issue with animation collaboration is not the bones or bone animation. It is the weightpainting.
The problem is the techniques various programs use to weigh meshes to the bones and animate them. As the process is not unified it is rather hard to translate it between various tools.

For animation you should look into CAL3d (caracter animation library) it is rather widely used, yet pretty unknown. And there have been importers and exporters galore - just saying not so you reinvent the wheel, unless it is about the process rather than the result.

3

Thanks arexma, I’ll look into that. :slight_smile: