Using skeleton animations created in Blender

In the Animation with skeletons recipe, we animated a model by directly changing the position and rotation of its bones. This works great in an interactive scenery but isn't a practical way to create animations. With Blender and other 3D tools, you've got a large set of tools to create animations based on a specific skeleton and a set of bones. In this recipe, we'll show you how you can play back a skeleton-based animation that was created in Blender.

Getting ready

To use this recipe, you need to have Blender installed and enable the Three.js exporter plugin. If you haven't done so, follow the steps from the Creating and exporting a model from Blender recipe, in Chapter 2, Geometries and Meshes. Once Blender and the Three.js export plugin have been installed, we need to create a skeleton-based animation. Creating this in Blender is out of the scope of this book, so we've provided an existing model to demonstrate this recipe. To get started, perform...