moving files from max to a game engine

sir-knight

It doesn't sound like a task an artist would be responsible for, but our in house developer working with me has asked me to research a way to get a rigged mesh with biped into directx format, and figure out how animations are stored for use in the game engine.

I have no idea how to do this. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be googling for, but currently, we have no sort of pipeline for 3d assets in our company.

Where do I even begin to look for that info?

What are some of the tools commonly used for conversion? How are animations carried over from max into direct x?

vahl

just by typing directx .x max export in google, I found that :

http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/defaul...maxexporter.asp

for the previous project I worked on, we were using .x too and had an heavily modified version of the XSI .x exporter, maybe el gwotto can help more, but maybe google can help you a lot too...

Ghostscape

Into .x format?

There are two exporters I know of, the Pandasoft exporter (which handles named animation sets with a keyframe range), and another free one released by the guys who make some 3d engine for demos and art (I'm blocking on the name) which handles animation differently.

Last I knew the exporter source code with the DirectX SDK was broken, but it was a simple to fix in the source code with some understanding of how the code worked.

But I haven't worked with .x formats in a few years, because it sucks balls and you have to license it for non-commercial projects.

sir-knight

well we've got more questions than answers at this point. I would assume that animations are stored separate of the rigged mesh? Do the exporters take .bip files and translate them to the appropriate format as well?

Thanks for the replies guys, I'll start chasing the leads you guys posted.

Ghostscape

The animations are stored in the .x file.

Go look up the exporters and read their documentation.

Having googled the pandasoft exporter it looks like you might want to check out this: http://kwxport.sourceforge.net/

sir-knight

yeah I found that one and I'm playing around with it, cool looks like I need to figure out how to prep the .max file so all the animations are present in the timeline and just enter their frame ranges in.

convert the .png texture to a .dds with a separate tool

and check off "ignore untextured" to not export the biped and we should be pretty good to go, right?

Ghostscape

I haven't used that exporter personally so I'm not sure.

developer.nvidia.com should have DDS exporters for PS listed on it.

sir-knight

I can feel some pretty stupid CS questions coming up real soon... like how I get all my animations into one max file :P I'll find it in the tutorials I hope.

Oh and I need to add that this community totally r0x0rz my b0x0rz off, cause in the 3 years I've been trying to do 3d and getting so frustrated that I just dump it and go back to the pencil, this is the most fun I've EVER had doing this stuff.

It's like making one drawing after another and seeing better results every single time a sketch is done or I come up with a question.

sir-knight

okay, I think I've got it decently figured out now and have a few more questions.

As far as I know, the raw mesh is exported and loading into the test engine just fine now.

If all the animations have to exist in the same .x file, would that mean the animations I put in need to be centered and anchored at the origin?

Also, how do I merge in other biped animations (bips) so they exist by themselves in the timeline without interferring with each other? I can probably just set keys before and after each animation and it should be fine. I went through the tutorials but aside from maybe the motion mixer (which seems more like it's for blending 2 different types of animations together), I can't find any other instruction that's close.