Reusing a Skeleton and Animation in Milkshape

Ok, I have six static character meshes in 3dsMax which I want to animate. They will all be animated with the exact same animations, so I don't want to create the same animations six times.

I like animating in 3dsMax, and I like modelling in 3dsMax. What I don't like doing in Max is rigging. I love rigging in Milkshape, so I would rather do that.

So what I would like to do is export the static meshes to a format that Blitz supports. Then animate a skeleton in 3dsMax, Biped preferably, but a UT skeleton or HL skeleton would be fine by me too.

Then I'd like to just rig the character to the sksleton and animations in Milkshape. But I don't know what format to use. I tried using the Halflife SMD exporter, but it seems to export the rig with the model rather then with the animation.

I don't think Max can export BVH, so what format can I/should I use to achieve this?

I'm pretty sure this should work

- Create skin model in max
- Create animations in max as segmented model (note limb names)
- Rig the skin model in milkshape naming the bones so they correspond with the bone names in the animation
- Load skin model with skeleton (b3d)
- addAnimSequence the animations

Since the bones take the animation from limbs with the same name as long as the scale doesn't change it should work fine. (He says ready to be prooved wrong :)

Hmm.. that does sound workable. It means I can't use a nice Biped rig to animate, but otherwise it ought to work. Thanks Ben, I'll give that a go now.