Bones in 3DS max or blender

Question

I'm pretty much grabbing at straws here cause I have no idea what I'm asking, but here is the question.

I've been looking at 3D modeling out of pure interest and came across the concept of bones. Now, I am not too sure what bones are even after looking it up on wiki, but they seem like an abstraction of real-life skeletons and whatnot, so in a model of say a human I just think of them as the skeleton.

To my understanding, a bone is defined by a translation, rotation, and a scale on the x, y and z axis'. (Isn't that just a single point?)

I am interested in taking a model in blender or max and export the information (whatever they may be) that is used to define these bones. I can definitely see the bones in these programs, but I want to get that out into a text file Is there a way to export this?

Answer 1

I think you need to seperate these ideas:

Bones - which as you correcly say have a position and rotation. They are the objects that you can control and will effect the skin of the model. They are usually in a hierarchy so that if you move one bone then it will affect all of the bones connected to it, like a human skeleton.

Skin - this is the polygonal mesh that you can usually see. It is given a base position by you in the editor and the skeleton operates on the skin to move it around.

Animation - This is data to pass to the bones. Usually a rotation, for example to make an arm bend.

http://gpwiki.org/index.php/OpenGL:Tutorials:Basic_Bones_System gives a good explanation.

Hope that helps :3