There has been a large selection of panda3D-ready models at http://www.alice.org/pandagallery/
They were created by CMU teachers and students for learning purposes 10+ years ago, but they were good if you:
a) Use Panda3D for non-commercial purposes, as a hobby
b) Aim for the retro look
c) Can’t do 3d modelling
Does anybody have this collection archived? Some of the original models are still available in the Alice 1 and 2 distribution, but they are in the propietary format common software doesn’t understand.
Regarding other free collections, there are some models from FPS Creator, that is open source now:
They are good, but it was impossible for me to load animated characters into Panda3D as Actors. They are all in .x format, and contain both vertice data and animation. Probably hierarchy is not suitable for Panda3D, too.
@rdb: Thanks, I think there’s enough models for now. I am lacking animated characters in the first place, and IIRC, there were little to none in the original gallery.
You beat me to it on the waybackmachine, yeah, it seems to be there.
I’ll still try to find out if it’s currently hosted elsewhere, though.
Wow, /that/ gallery. That’s so old even I have some models in there.
As for animation, IIRC nothing in Alice at that time had any traditional keyframe animation. All animation was done with alice code, which could be embedded into the .a2c file even, but I never knew of that being exportable to any other format.