Opening MD2s...

[The Dreaming Dragon]

Is it possible to open an MD2 and extract the various components from it? I want to play with the various animations the models have...what program will do it?

[themuffinman]

Is it possible to open an MD2 and extract the various components from it?

Open MD2's, yes. Various components being what? The triangles?

I want to play with the various animations the models have...what program will do it?

MD2 files (among others) are compiled and have the animations 'built-in' for a lack of a better word. I personally have never been able to extract animation joints from MD2 or MD3 files yet, and I doubt anyone has (I could be wrong).
Anyhow, you can import MD2 files and view the animation frames with the following programs:
chUmbaLum sOft Milkshape 3D - 3D model maker (but comes as a trial version for 30 days, albeit fully functional)
Quake Army Knife (QuArK) - Map editor, Model viewer/maker, pak file viewer and texture viewer for multiple games.

Milkshape 3D would be my preference as it's very straight forward for those of us who ain't pro modellers - I've never made any models with QuArK before but I'd imagine it would be difficult considering it's unfriendly UI.

[Whirlingdervish]

http://dervish.tastyspleen.net/files/q2mdlr9b.zip

Here's a copy of Q2 Modeller. It's a useful little .md2 editor.

There's an export option, but I'm not sure what formats it can export to.

edit: apparently it can do .3DS and a couple of other formats, but it seems to be frame by frame.

[beanstorm]

Yeah, Dervish is right. Theres a few progs that will open md2 files but most will only display the mesh.
Q2Modeller will show all the animation frames but no skeleton.
Im not sure what you aim to achieve, but you really need to have a skeleton and mesh to do anything significant.

[The Happy Friar]

md2's have no skeleton, they're just vertex based animated models.  blender can import/export them.  Can't load the texture though because it doesn't support pcx (convert to tga to solve that problem).

there's nothing to the model really.  I'm sure if id made it today it would be a text-format based file like md5's.

[The Dreaming Dragon]

What I was hoping for was to use this free copy of Poser and possibly experiment with changing the various animations around. But learning Poser will be an uphill battle and if I had fodder for fiddling purposes it would have been that much easier. But thanks or your responses...

[The Happy Friar]

you can get the models in to poser but they don't have parts for poser to use so it won't let you animate anything.