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I know I must sound dumb asking this but Im still quite new to game design. Ive taught myself some advanced modelling techniques with some help but now Im ready to animate I don't know where to start.
How do bones animations work?
How do you assign animations to actions in darkBASIC like walking?
here are the main questions I want answers to more will probably follow.
Thankyou

Models are made up of lots of objects and vertexs (?). Instead of having to move these around manually we can assign them to 'bones'. In the animation program you build a skelenton, which is basically a super simplified version of your model so you can animate it easily.

In DB, everything gets dumped to one object with every animation.

Each object has lots of frames, each one at a slightly different position, the different animations are done by looping different parts of the frames.

Say you have a stick man model, it's frames could look like this:



As you can see it's one big animation. If you want the character to the walk you'd loop from 1 to 5, but if you want him to jump you'd loop from 6 to 9. Looping from 1 to 9 would make it jump horribly between the animations.

So if I used 3d Max to bone animate a model what file format do I save it as?
If a model is walking and I press space to make him jump will he jump straight away or ar the end of the walk loop?
Thanks Chris

what i dunt understand is how the PC knows which no. is which

the animations are part of the model file, you have several frames like above and the computer will play all of the animations from start to finish, or you can tell it to play just frames 4 to 8 for example, you have to know what frames give what animation then you write your code so that when somebody presses the jump button your code plays the jump animation, and when they presss forwards it plays the walk animation over and over until you let go, often models are saved with just one animation attached, so for example in a darkmatter model folder you have files like

walk.x
jump.x
idle.x
static.x
attack.x

so if I wanted to just have a model that walked and jumped, and the jump animation eneded at frame 10 foexample, I would do

load object walk.x,1
append object jump.x,1,11

would load the walking object and then add the jump object to frame 11 onwards, so playing the animation from 1 to 10 would do the walking loop, and playing 11 to the end would do the jump sequence, the point is that your code tells the computer when to swap from one sequence to another, you would have something like this (psuedocode)

do
if jumpkey then play animation from 11 to end
if forwardskey then play animation 1 to 10
sync
loop

so when an object plays a specific part of its animation is down to the code, not the object it`self, this allows you to be very flexible, at the moment, if you are using pro, then .x file format is the best to use, hope thats some help.

Mentor.