Maya is a professional 3D modeling and animation program. It allows you to model 3D objects, texture them, animate them, and then render them. The rendering in Maya is done either through it''s included renderer, or a 3rd party stand-alone renderer(eg renderman).

There are other programs out there that do the same thing. 3D Studio Max, produced by Discreet, is the most widely used package for games.

Anyway, no matter which of these programs you use for game development the methods are the same. To get the models and animations that are created in the these programs into your games you typically write an exporter to extract the information you need. Then you write something in your game to read these files in and display them. Alternatively, you can use one of their built-in export file formats, but you usually run into obstacles after awhile by going this route.

Putting an FMV that was created in one of these programs into your game is simple. Just render out the sequence from the program as a sequence of images, bring it into an editing program(eg Adobe Premier), edit it, add your soundtrack, etc, and then save it out as whatever movie format you want(eg mpeg, avi, etc). Then, just add the ability to play that movie format in your game and you''re good to go

-John

quote:Original post by RoninSeraph
So I''d have to program a translator in order to use environments or characters from Maya to a game?

In essence, yes. You could use some pre-defined formats to prototype models, if you find the loaders on the ''net, but on the long run i recommend designing a format yourself.
Your own format can hold exactly as little or as much data as you need, remember

quote:
Sorry for the ignorance of this topic. I''m an artist, and lately have been thinking about teaming up with a friend to make a game. We''re doing research about it, and trying to find as many shortcuts as we can.

It''s not a stupid question, especially since you define yourself as an artist, not a programmer.
I can''t offer any shortcuts, but if you have trouble in programming the exporter, ask the rest of us for help in this forum.

-Nik

This is the perfect helper site for writting an exporter for Maya, though you need to look at lepTranslator.cpp in the Maya SDK example folder to really understand what he''s talking about.

http://www.ewertb.com/maya/api/index.html

Chris Pergrossi
My Realm | "Good Morning, Dave"

Just as mentioned before, Maya is NOT widely used in game develop now. But Alias seems to be interested in gaming recently. He wants to take a piece in this big market.

Maybe one day Maya is not only the most powerful 3D software in film industry, also in game industry.

[edited by - Challenger17 on November 19, 2003 9:00:28 AM]