bone animation just wandering

Hi, i'm not a modeler myself, however I was wandering the type of model animation warcraftIII uses: bone animation or key/frame-by-frame animation.
I'm sure I can find the answer by searching the tutorials/forum. It's just that I was hoping for a quick reply.

Thanks.

I'm not a modeller myself either, but I'm pretty sure I've heard of the use of "bone" animations before. I know for sure that auras use bones, but I don't know about units. Chriz would be the one to PM about this.

Well acutly when you animate bones your doing keyframes like you stated but i think you meant rather you need bones to animate or you just animate the model without them. And the awnser is you do need bones for warcraft 3 although some people found ways around that.

Thanks for replies

I don't use bones, I separate the mesh and fix the pivot points to where the bones would normally be.

But yes mostly bones are used to animate. And keyframes are how you keep track of the movements you make, and then you can make the animations.

Warcraft III is using skeletal system using Quaternions for storing rotation data. They are cool thingies that never get stuck (google for gimbal lock). Model files store their rotation in keyframes. W3 interpolates them using SLERP (google it). also there are 3 types of interpolation:

Linear - rotation changes at same speed
Hermite/Bezier - change of movement differs (look how bezier curve looks like, and imagine it's a chart of Rotation over Time)