One thing that's been sitting on my todo list for far too long was to review some new Milkshape 3D code. Milkshape 3D is a modeling program for building and animating 3d models. It's claim to fame is its ability to read in just about any 3d file format under the sun.

Mark Plas decided to have another go at interfacing with the milkshape 3d file format and this time decided to also pull in the animation keyframes for the model. The result is nothing short of very impressive. I got a high frame rate and that was before I knew how it was doing it - every single frame the computations were for the limb positions were computed using the CPU, not the GPU. This is a fairly impressive feat and I didn't even notice any severe garbage collection.

Please excuse the low quality video, I had to shoot it on my windows machine and there I just grabbed CamStudio for this quick screencast.

Take a look at the video here: http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/20291/Cincom%20Smalltalk/OpenGL-20090402-Milkshape3D-Animated-Turtle.avi

The movie is also available as a .mov if you don't have the codecs for .avi: http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/20291/Cincom%20Smalltalk/OpenGL-20090402-Milkshape3D-Animated-Turtle.mov