Quote:Original post by Icebone1000 I was hoping for some kind of best alternative that everyone agrees with...why there isnt any? How ppl do this? I mean, its a must task for who works with games...
The 'best' final format is a binary dump of your game's vertex data in the correct order to be loaded and rendered directly.
COLLADA however ISNT a final format, its a graphics interchange format which really shouldn't be used for final game assets (although I get the impression that some people use it as that).
Most larger game engines store their content in a format that can be directly loaded into memory (for instance by directly serializing their C++ data structures). It's often crucial for achieving short load times, particularly on consoles.
Formats like X/Collada/FBX are considered "interchange formats", because they're generic and have an open specification (or freely available importer/exporter tools, in the case of FBX). This allows them to be used for exporting from one content creation utility and importing into another. Or alternatively many game studios will initially export from their content creation app into one of these formats, and then their offline toolchain will process the data and produce their custom data format suitable for runtime loading. In some cases in can be perfectly feasible or even practical to directly load these formats at runtime, which generally applies to smaller games on the PC. It really depends on your needs.
Thanks for the insight, reading the fbx sdk docs(and a bit of the book focus on 3d meshs) I alredy get the idea that you are mentioning, the thing is I didnt know what file to start from(I was looking for some kind of OBJ but with animation).. Looks like FBX and collada is really the way to go
btw about the warnings Im getting, Im using this: #pragma warning( push ) #pragma warning(disable:4100) #pragma warning(disable:4512) #include <fbxsdk.h> #pragma warning( pop )
