3d studio .ASE loader

I want to be able to load an animated 3ds file into c++ with openGL. I have found very little on how to use the animation section of the ase file on the web. I have found out how to load a “static” mesh but not how to load animation. Is there a better way to do this? Like working with the 3ds file directly?

As far as I know, the .ase format exports animation frame by frame (a mesh for every frame), so if you can load one frame, you can also load the rest of the meshes that form the animation…

Since a good animation done only with meshes will demand a lot of storage space, maybe you could do a linear interpolation bethween two frames, to save some space, and get a smooth animation…

I Hope this helps.

  • Royconejo.

When exporting from 3DSMAX, you can select to export entire animating meshes on each frame, export entire animating meshes every N frames, entire animating meshes only on key frames or just the mesh once and then dump the animation key values.

In general the ASE exporter is kinda buggy, but I’ve publically posted a version that fixes all the bugs that I encountered. There’s versions for Max 2.5 thru Max 4.0, with a list of the changes, plus all the sources.

You can find it at: http://www.pond.net/~davem/asciiexp/

-Blake