I'll have to look into this. My approach is starting to irritate me. It has a few major downsides.
1. 20% footprint bloat. A single large mesh with 100 frames of animation meshes is 20% less bytes than 6 body part meshes with with 600 frames of animation. My approach chews up a few more MB of memory as well.
2. The limb indexes (0-5) change everytime I export. The xyz offsets are the same but its annoying when the arms switch spots for example.
3. Java complexity. I'm over the hurdle now but it is just plain complex!
My biggest issue right now is animation looping. I've got my 3rd person character running and jumping via the gamepad but the "run" loop transition has a nasty hiccup. I'll fix it tonight but its a hassle because the export process is extremely tedious. I have to "snapshot" every 5th frame to avoid an enormous 3DS file. Too bad the JPCT 3DS loader doesnt support pruning frames (ie. load every 5th animation mesh).
Actually, I think its a burden Max should handle. Now I'm going to rant a bit. The "frame" selection process in Max just stinks. I want a frame pruning function! I can't believe people sit there and manually snapshot every "n" frame by hand, or use the silly snapshot range dialog and manually select every nth frame. Testing a loop of animation stinks too. For example you can't sit there and play just frames 100-160 in a loop in Max. That would be too easy! How am I supposed to see the loop without doing a tedious export??? The "rendering" function is useless since the framerate is so low. Maybe I missed something in the GUI?