FBX vs. Collada vs. ?

Eric Chadwick

I'm looking at a possible project that would involve exporting animated meshes (bones and Skin) from Max 9 into an intermediary 3d format, which would be imported into a new 3D engine being developed for a handheld.

Would be nice if it supported material definitions as well, but that's not required as we'll probably be using fixed shaders. Also may need to export LODs, collision meshes, etc.

I'm wondering which intermediary 3D format might be the best for this. FBX looks pretty solid on paper, though we'd have to meld with its SDK. Collada looks a bit more open, being XML, but maybe not as production-proven.

Advice?

Rob Galanakis

If you are just using this for skinned models, skeletons, and animations, check out OGRE's .mesh and .skeleton format (in XML). They will really give you all you need to use in a nice and clean XML format, and won't carry any of the opacity, confusion, or clutter of FBX or Collada.

rooster

dont have much useful input, but might help-
we initially started using fbx but fairly quickly switched to collada. I believe one main reason was because we can debug anything in collada ourselves but not fbx, and updates are few and far between. support was not impressive i gather. I can't comment on the specific things you mention though, not sure

Eric Chadwick

OGREMax looks pretty good, thanks.

And rooster are you guys using ColladaMax? Support wasn't good for FBX? or for Collada?

Also looking at 3DXI, the IGame export functions built into the Max SDK, looks like it might work too.

rooster

support was sluggish for fbx sorry I wasnt clear- but we're using collada for maya, from feeling software

Ruz

'callada' sounds like an incurable disease. I think only plugins with cool names should be allowed to thrive

ElysiumGX

[ QUOTE ]
'callada' sounds like an incurable disease. I think only plugins with cool names should be allowed to thrive

[/ QUOTE ]

'co-lada' sounds like a mixed drink. weee party!

Eric Chadwick

If it's good enough for My Little Ponies, it's good enough for me.

rooster

we get pissed all the time on colladas, pina and otherwise
edit: to be more accurate the substance involved in the above post was the slightly less glamourous brown ale

Ruz

at a place I used to work all the max plugins had rude names like jiggy, bitch etc. very weird:)