Heya, I recently purchased Carrara 1.1 (got a very cheap rate otherwise I would've bought version 2) and I'm begining to develope a PC game with some friends. My question is when I am finished modeling my characters and animating them in Carrara is it possible to export them as a 3ds with full animation and textures for my game engine to read? Or will it only save the model itself as a 3ds? I'm glad I ran across this forum too, if I try to ask anything about Carrara elsewhere people just reply with flames saying '3d studio max is the best, get it.' ...riiight like I can afford such a program just starting out! :P Thanks for any responses!!

I don't have a whole lot of experience with 3ds files (pretty much none) but stuff that I've read leads me to believe that you can export your model and texture. As far as animation stuff goes, not really sure. -Kix

If you want to use directx you will need to export to .3ds to convert to an .X file. You might look on the opengl.org forum. I saw something like what you're asking about there a few months ago in one of their many tutorials. opengl is another good way to go and you might want to chech into that. As to whether you can save 3ds as a motion file the way you can with an obj I'm not sure but I think that they are static. You may have to make a series of 3ds files the way we used to do for 2d (like a flip book only in 3d.)

Unfortunatly, Carrara doesn't export it's animation data. Only
still models with their textures. Sorry :

Hmmm.... check into what you can do with .obj files for export. When you export the obj file check the I think its "frames" (or something like that) number. if it it's the same as the number of frames in your animation it probably holds the animation info for the model there. similarly there should be a separate file refering to where the textures are kept when exporting as an obj. Providing the motion information is in the obj, theortically you then might be able to convert the wavefront obj info to 3ds or whatever in another app. I'd like to know what you find out as eventually I'm gonna try the same thing. - TJ

Hmm, a '3d flip book' might cause some problems since I'm going to eventually use the animations in a game. The game engine would probably suffer some frame rate loss if I used that technique. I'll certainly see what the .obj files give me and play around with it in hopes to get something working. I'll let you know how I do. Thanks!

If you want to check into using obj, check the poser forum search under Ajax(a member who knows alot about this stuff),frame,obj or look at threads around dec - april of last year in poser forum.