Hi Eteus
first of all, it can be done, but it has limitations. Whole model with the skeleton can be exported to 2 formats - LWO6.5 = Lightwave format and ASE = 3DStudio MAX text format. Maybe even .TXT / .MS3D = Milkshape format can hold those skeletons, but I'm not sure about that. File format 3DS is very old and I think that it can't hold skeleton information.
I worked with models bound to skeletons and it works really well. I tried both Lightwave and 3DS MAX. You can see screenshots of the renders in the "FF7 models to 3ds Max" thread ( see link below ). By the way Biturn can export model with skeleton with only one position of the frame of the animation file ( anyhow, so far it can't read any animations besides of first frame ).
You can read more about this in these threads:
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=2819http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=4404some more links:
http://mirex.mypage.sk/RNR/rnr.php?action=show_notes&parentid=97To get the bone positions in the human-readable numbers you can either:
- Export model with skeleton to .ASE format, which is text format. You should be able to find skeleton bone joints as geometry objects named "root" or "b<joint number>". They should be stored on start of the file.
- Or even easier way - open the FF7 model in Biturn and click on 'Data info' button. You should be able to browse through all the model data there. In the first combo select 'joints' to see position of bone joints, 'bones' to see how are they connected and to see length of the bones, or 'bone animation' to see rotation of the bones
But another thing is that you say "in Bitturn, when you load one of the xxAA files, it loads the individual pieces for you," ... does that mean that you don't see whole model in meaningfull position, when you open xxAA file in Biturn ? You should see model completely as it should look like, for example as this one (Joker):
If you see only pieces, that would mean that you're probably missing animation file xxDA of the model. Try to extract it, and place it along the model files.
Hope this info helped you.