How do you guys use meshes with Java (with animation)?

[asyx]

Hello!

How do you guys import Meshes? I decided to use Java for my little fun project but I can't find a Java library that can deal with animations. Of course, everybody and their mother has written an OBJ importer for some random tutorial but OBJ doesn't like animation.

So, is there something like that or should I try to implement it on my own? As far as I know, the Quake models are just a bunch of OBJs per keyframe and then they use a Bézier curve or B-Spline to get some smooth transitions. That doesn't seem too hard (I know how to deal with both curves), to be honest. But why reinvent the wheel, right?

But I might have misunderstood and it's actually a lot harder than that. I'd hate to have to switch to C++ since I'm not a big fan of C++ (don't like the feel of the language, I find the IDEs that run on Windows quite annoying for C++ and GLEW is taking away the auto completion for parameter lists and so on...).

I'm not under time pressure, though. So, I have a few weeks to invest into that.

Thanks.

[quew8]

So if you want to do key-framed wavefront (.obj) models then it is as simple as what you have described. You certainly don't have to venture into C to achieve it. You can write your own wavefront importer in a couple of hours at most, interpolation might take a little longer. This is about the simplest mesh-deforming animation you can get though.

If and when you want to move beyond, I recommend skeletal animation and COLLADA (.dae) is a good format for that.

[asyx]

Thanks

Probably trying OBJ first. If I run into problems I'm going to expand to COLLADA.