Best games for PPMs using Max 7?

BRUTICUS(CW)

Hi, i'm going to be teaching a class involving game character creation using 3D studio Max 7 at a local college. I have been working with Maya and XSI in recent years so i'm not quite up to speed with which games best support this version of Max.

I was hoping to get some recommendations on the best game to use for this class. Weighing the factors of price (of game), user friendliness for the students and amount of control in the exporting process. Quake 3 is cheap now and there appears to be an exporter for Max 7 so that is a possibility but im still looking for something more.

My main limitation is 3D Studio Max 7, this is the software we'll be using so I need a good sturdy plug-in for it.

Id appreciate the suggestions.

kendo

I can’t say with any degree of certainty as I have not personally modded new characters into it but many of the recent skinning threads that have caught on have been for ut2k4. I would have suggested hl2 but I have seen very little documentation on getting new characters in game.

MoP

UT2k4 would be a good bet. Quake 3 is a fine backup plan, but it's purely vertex-based animation and the tags system is kinda limiting.
You could always give Doom3 a try too, although I've never tried getting stuff from Max to Doom, but I know it's possible.
The whole process for UT2k4 is pretty simple, especially if you're using the premade player skeletons rather than custom bones and animations. It'd also require learning a little UnrealEd, though ... but it's easy to pick up and the whole process is pretty painless.

lkraan

How long is the class and how much knowledge of 3d modelling and the tools do the students have?
If they are all starting from scratch then I would go for UT2004 or Quake also because there are a ton of tutorials around.
If the studenst have some knowledge already and the class is long then you might as well go for a game that handles normal and bump maps since that seems to be the current/next new thing and it teaches both low and high poly modelling. It's more time consuming though.

KDR_11k

Doom 3 is pretty limited, there's no support for PPMs OOTB and I haven't implemented custom animations or a GUI into the PPM mod (never mind it won't work with RoE since RoE isn't sold in my country)... Oh and it needs loads of text editing (pretty trivial stuff but still) to get it working.

vahl

indeed doom3 asks a lot of extra work and text editing to add playermodels...to me ut2k4 is yet the easiest, plus the actorx plugin is really good, and you have all the needed support on the udn...

BRUTICUS(CW)

The students have had intro to 3D studio max classes aswell as photoshop. Its part time classes. So one class a week for 6 weeks.
Ill look into getting UT2K4. Might have to stick with Quake 3 tho as we already have some licenses for that.

Yeah im not too stoked on the text editing, I loved the simplicity of Quake 2! Model, animate as per frames, thats it!

Thanks for the suggestions all.

KDR_11k

What I hate most about UT is its fucked up intermediate model format. You can't export that without using a Microsoft C compiler because some idiot decided that writing structs directly into a file was smart. Trying to write those files with a GNU program crashes UED. If your app already supports it consider yousel lucky because trying to write an exporter for that format is futile. There's a reason most binary format speciications have per-byte explainations and don't expect you to dump structs into a file and hope your compiler thinks about that the same way theirs does (and God help you if you've got a PPC or something).