Animations

This page describes the main techniques used to animate a model in a game. By animation, it is understood here the way how a model is animated as a body, not the manner how it moves in a 3d world.

There are essentially 2 ways to animate a model, which are:

• Frame animation. This is the way how models were animated in old school engines, especially in the Quake games series, until Quake III. This technique consists essentially to render a model in a given position, based on an index changing in time. This is more or less the manner how 2d sprites are rendered, but applied to 3d models. For that reason this technique is very simple to understand and apply, but it is very limited, and modern games no longer use it. However it may be enough for a small or a retro-gaming style game.
• Skeletal animation. This is the modern way to animate a model, and many 3d engines, like Unity and Unreal, use this technique. It is more complex to understand than the above frame animation technique, but very more powerful, and it is essential for any games which wish to show realistic animations based on very detailed models.

In CompactStar, the both techniques were implemented, one with the Quake I model (.mdl) file support, other with the DirectX (.x) and Collada (.dae) files support.