(The following is speculation based on my experience with writing exporters for Maya using the SDK and the scripting language. It is probably similar for 3dsMAX though.)
An exporter written with MaxScript will probably be a lot slower then one written with the SDK as well. This may not be too big a deal for you because you would really only notice a huge slow down if you have pretty large (as in high vertex-count) models, and for a game the models may not be too large. In my exporter I wrote with Maya's scripting language, for a pretty large model (~30k triangles I think, it was a while ago) it took a LONG time to export. If I remember correctly the exporter written with the SDK was about 10 times faster.
Again, this may not matter for your purposes, but it's something to keep in mind.
Creating a model exporter plugin for 3dsMAX
...perhaps Sneftel's comment may not be exactly clear:
i would highly recomment *not* to use MAXscript. (to say in other words: "you will get, what you invest").
i would highly recomment *not* to use MAXscript. (to say in other words: "you will get, what you invest").
Quote:Original post by Sneftel
I have written exporters using the Max SDK, and using MaxScript. I would not recommend the latter. MaxScript is a bad, bad language. It's okay for quick one-off automation scripts; it is not suitable for long-term maintained software.
I've also used both. I'm curious why you think Maxscript is so bad. I've actually had a lot of good success with it. In fact, for long-term maintanance, it's a bit nicer in many ways. Especially since you don't HAVE to re-write your Maxscripts every release, but with most releases you have to, at the very least, re-compile all of your plugins.
I'd also toss a third suggestion into the mix. Use Maxscript, and if you find things that take too long or run into areas where you can't access some data then you can write a simpler plugin that exposes new functionality to Maxscript. On the last project that I did a lot of heavy Max tool creation I used this hybrid approach a lot. It's really nice. You can keep all of your high-level logic and functionality in Maxscript and then call your custom functions to do your heavy lifting on the SDK side.
With all that being said, if this is for a commercial game, then I'd recommend just licensing Rad Gametool's Granny exporter and be done with it =)
-John
Hello,
I'd recommend writing your exporter with the help of the IGame wrapper of the maxsdk. There's plenty of documentation for it and it's really intuitive to work with.
The only problem I've run into so far is loading the model back into my engine when it has texture coordinates assigned to it. Max stores seperate indices for the vertices and the texcoords, whereas OpenGL has to have one index for both arrays.
I've found some code to merge the arrays, so you can render the vertices and the texcoords with one index. It's at: http://www.mindcontrol.org/~hplus/graphics/vertex-arrays.html
Unfortunately when I use the code, the geometry loads in fine, but it's all black instead of having a texture.
I've also written a .3ds loader for my engine and those objects load perfectly fine. The resulting vertexcount for the .3ds file and my file does differ though.
Does anyone know what the problem could be? (looking at the code on the above site)
Thanx
I'd recommend writing your exporter with the help of the IGame wrapper of the maxsdk. There's plenty of documentation for it and it's really intuitive to work with.
The only problem I've run into so far is loading the model back into my engine when it has texture coordinates assigned to it. Max stores seperate indices for the vertices and the texcoords, whereas OpenGL has to have one index for both arrays.
I've found some code to merge the arrays, so you can render the vertices and the texcoords with one index. It's at: http://www.mindcontrol.org/~hplus/graphics/vertex-arrays.html
Unfortunately when I use the code, the geometry loads in fine, but it's all black instead of having a texture.
I've also written a .3ds loader for my engine and those objects load perfectly fine. The resulting vertexcount for the .3ds file and my file does differ though.
Does anyone know what the problem could be? (looking at the code on the above site)
Thanx
godmodder,
regarding your uvcoords/vertex-index problem:
you have to "unroll" these arrays in the code (may look a bit complicated, but it's easy).
regarding your uvcoords/vertex-index problem:
you have to "unroll" these arrays in the code (may look a bit complicated, but it's easy).
Quote:Original post by godmodder
I'd recommend writing your exporter with the help of the IGame wrapper of the maxsdk. There's plenty of documentation for it and it's really intuitive to work with.
hmmm... in my experiance IGame has never been up to production ready statndards. The collada max exporter is based on this, and it tends to fail a lot. I still say the ASE example is the best way to go.
Quote:I've also used both. I'm curious why you think Maxscript is so bad. I've actually had a lot of good success with it. In fact, for long-term maintanance, it's a bit nicer in many ways. Especially since you don't HAVE to re-write your Maxscripts every release, but with most releases you have to, at the very least, re-compile all of your plugins.
maybe, however debugging and profiling tools are far better in C++ than any tools to help you locate max script problems.
Quote:With all that being said, if this is for a commercial game, then I'd recommend just licensing Rad Gametool's Granny exporter and be done with it =)
I bet they started with the ase example in the sdk.
Quote:final export should be done as simple as it can be, so in future/eventually you can write another simple exporter from Maya for example. Non-indexed geometry for example. All indexing, stripification, texture compression, atlases - this is good to be done *outside* the modeling package.
not strictly true in my experiance. If you started in Maya, then at a later date switched to max, then that is fairly easy. Starting in Max then writing a Maya exporter is going to be far less successful.
Well, everybody tells me it's soooo easy to "unroll" those vertices and uv-coords. So why come that there isn't a single site that has code that actually DOES the job? The furthest I've come to the solution is that the geometry draws correctly, but it's all black instead of having a texture.
Could somebody please SHOW me how to do it instead of saying it's sooo easy.
PS: 'cause it's NOT easy :)
PS2 (pun?): this is not meant to be offending in any kind
Could somebody please SHOW me how to do it instead of saying it's sooo easy.
PS: 'cause it's NOT easy :)
PS2 (pun?): this is not meant to be offending in any kind
Quote:Original post by Sneftel
I have written exporters using the Max SDK, and using MaxScript. I would not recommend the latter. MaxScript is a bad, bad language. It's okay for quick one-off automation scripts; it is not suitable for long-term maintained software.
Yes, I agree completely. I have done very simple small formats in MaxScript before, and that was bad enough. Our DLE exporters are so large that it would be inconceivable to write it in maxscript. Also, if you ever consider supporting more than one DCC, you should probably make a centralized exporter library, and then just call that from the specific tool - which isn't possible with MaxScript. Otherwise, your the time you spend maintaining your code is immense. If you have completely separated exporters for Max 4, 6, 8, Maya, ect, each thousands and thousands of lines a piece, you will get swamped very quickly.
Quote:With all that being said, if this is for a commercial game, then I'd recommend just licensing Rad Gametool's Granny exporter and be done with it =)
*cough* EmotionFX > Granny *cough*
Quote:Original post by godmodder
Well, everybody tells me it's soooo easy to "unroll" those vertices and uv-coords. So why come that there isn't a single site that has code that actually DOES the job?
because you are not looking hard enough.
http://www.robthebloke.org/source/ObjLoader.zip
Quote:The furthest I've come to the solution is that the geometry draws correctly, but it's all black instead of having a texture.
are you sure that is a problem with the vertex arrays? does your texture load correctly? have you tested texturing on a single quad? the code on the website doesn't handle normals, have you got lighting on? are you using GL_MODULATE as the texture mode and have you set the colour to black? If your geometry draws correctly it probably isn't the fault of the vertex arrays, but a fault somewhere else in your code.
Quote:PS: 'cause it's NOT easy :)
yes, it is easy.
Hello,
I finally solved the problem. I replaced a glColorub(255,255,255) with a glColor4f(1,1,1,1) and for some reason, it works now.
Could somebody explain why there would be any reason for this? (I don't use a glColor command anywhere else except for my fonts and this doesn't affect the end result)
I finally solved the problem. I replaced a glColorub(255,255,255) with a glColor4f(1,1,1,1) and for some reason, it works now.
Could somebody explain why there would be any reason for this? (I don't use a glColor command anywhere else except for my fonts and this doesn't affect the end result)
This topic is closed to new replies.
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