Friday, April 25, 2008

MD5 Mesh and Animation

Two young and very talented modelers from Sweden have started making some game content to be used in Decade. MD5 was their format of choice for doing animations so I used this requirement as an opportunity to research the format.

A good explanation of the .md5mesh file format can be found here and a similar explanation of .md5anim can be found here.



After reading the two file format descriptions specified above as well as a refresher on quaternions it was not too difficult to parse the files and create the mesh and animations.

In order to make Decade's MD5 support as complete as possible it supports multiple loading methods which are specified through a flag parameter in the Load function. One can build hardware/software vertex and index buffers for each specified frame at load time or they can be populated when required.

If an animation does not have a high enough count of frames per second, Decade can calculate additional frames using the mesh/anim data along with quaternions and slerp.

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