Poly Types and Animations in TGEA...

Enlighter

So I am new to the community here. I am a complete newb when it comes to the 3D side of things and game engines.

I have a few questions that hopefully some of you more experienced 3D'rs can help with.

1. Poly type, what's best for TGEA Triangles, Quads, or Nurbs (not even sure if there is support for nurbs).

2. Animations - All animations are being done in Maya. Question is, what's the best way to do the rigging/animating for TGEA, and what format should they be exported in so they can be imported into TGEA.

I think that's it for now haha, I know I will have many more as the project progresses.

Thanks so much in advance for the advice.

Cheers.

jocose

If you are talking about Torque Game Engine Advanced then I suggest you post on the Garage Games forums under the artist section. Not to many people on here use Torque and the majority of those who do dislike it, the best place to find artists who use it on a regular basis are on the GG forums.

So in other words this is a great place to get feedback about your art in general but I would save the TGEA specific questions for the GG forums.

As for your questions Torque does not support nurbs, all models must be triangulated (this is true for any game engine but some engines auto-triangle models for you).

Rigging has very little rules except that you have to use bones. Weight your model with bones. Then you can rig it however you want since the rig is not exported just the transforms on the bones.

Enlighter

to be honest I am starting to see why people don't like it. And I would post on the GG forums, but they are terribly unimpressive.

What engines are you all fans of?

ceebee

Probably Unreal and Source. You can mod/develop on them for free (well, you gotta have the games) as long as you're not going to sell the stuff. In that case you'd have to buy an engine license which is pretty expensive.

So if you're developing games for experience and education go for either of those two. Unreal engine is probably a much more marketable skill to have unless you're trying to land a job with Valve.

jocose

If you give some specifics about what you are trying to do we might be able to offer some engine specific advice.

oXYnary

Enlighter wrote: »

So I am new to the community here. I am a complete newb when it comes to the 3D side of things and game engines.

I have a few questions that hopefully some of you more experienced 3D'rs can help with.

1. Poly type, what's best for TGEA Triangles, Quads, or Nurbs (not even sure if there is support for nurbs).

2. Animations - All animations are being done in Maya. Question is, what's the best way to do the rigging/animating for TGEA, and what format should they be exported in so they can be imported into TGEA.

I think that's it for now haha, I know I will have many more as the project progresses.

Thanks so much in advance for the advice.

Cheers.

TGEA user (unfortunately)

1. As stated all models are converted to triangles for pretty much every engine out there. Working in your modeling program, you dont need to worry about this until you are ready to export. At least in max, I can keep my low poly in quads view and the exporter will convert.

2. You export the animations separate from the model. Both need to have the same bones and structure. Each animation is exported as a dsq file (versus the dts). You might want to pick up a copy of Torque Show Tool. As you can use this to verify the animations and your models before placing in engine.


Also, assuming you have gone to GG and gotten the maya export plugin?

Daaark

1. Triangles. It's only ever triangles. No matter what anyone tells you. The GPU deals in triangles only. OpenGL lets you send quads to draw to the GPU, but they are broken up into triangles at the driver level. Any game that accepts quads or ngons will triangulate the data and store it in the proper format first!