Anyone know how to do them?
The Blender 3D: Noob to Pro guide shows how to set up a simple set of bones (or armatures). Just look at the Using Bones page.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro)
Bones don't export correctly IIRC.
My undrstanding of bone animation is that it's typically the most difficult animation type to export correctly due to the variations used by different 3d modeling systems as far as bones are concerned. Someone, mentioned that vertex animations are more easily translated across modeling platforms then bone animation.
What works great in the modeler itself seems to suffer when converting the modelers native bone system to other formats like X, 3ds, and XSI. For example, I created 2 rounded cylinders touching each other to form a basic human arm. Then I built a skeleton with 2 joints; one for the shoulder and a second for the elbow, and attached the bone assembly and rounded cylinders together. I set a single axis from which the shoulder and elbow could pivot along a single axis like a real arm. Then I set a single keyframe with a total of 5 frames and then moved the joints to set the IK animation up. It played fine in GSL with both cylinders moving fairly smoothly along with the bone structure. However, when I exported the arm as an X file and opened it up in 3dex to check it out the animation it did absolutely nothing. I've exported animation before that didn't use bones at all instead they were done with simple keyframe move and rotation animation. These play fine in 3dex, but bone animation was a no go....
We need to find out how to do that.
As I mentioned every 3d modeler uses it own version for animating bones, joints and geometry that is pysically connected together. TS and B3d are no exception as well as Max and other popular modeling packages. The issue if further complicated by BZII exclusive using of a now outdated XSI format. I guess that's why I was wondering if some work could be done prior to release of the next beta to somewhat update BZII abiltity to read a newer version of XSI text based model files, so us modeling igits can make some animated XSI files to proper way rather then trying make stuff using the old format for which there generally doesn't appear to be any usable conversion tools...pant, pant, pant...what do you say fellers! Whoa, Sparky...down boy!
I'd like to point out BZ2 uses Vertex animation technically, and that Bone animation IS vertex animation.
Vertexes are related to 'bone' objects. These objects are animated and thus the verts move when they do. Easy as pie. You can construct a 'skeleton' and animate it in anything that exports the animation correctly into BZ2 and then simply edit the XSI to tie the verts by # to the bones with their weight %s.