Exporting into the engine
polycounter lvl 11
Making this thread out of curiosity as to how other studios handle engine exporting and importing of assets.
I'm just curious as to how other places work. For us, the artists handle it through an exporter from Max. I heard of some places where all you do is save the Max/Maya file and it goes right in. Others where there's a person whose job is (among other duties) to get assets into the engine.
How is exporting into the engine handled at your studio?
I'm just curious as to how other places work. For us, the artists handle it through an exporter from Max. I heard of some places where all you do is save the Max/Maya file and it goes right in. Others where there's a person whose job is (among other duties) to get assets into the engine.
How is exporting into the engine handled at your studio?
Replies
Advantage is that I don't need to export into any kind of a special custom format. I simply dump all my files into a directory and the .pkg knows what to do.
Love being able to build everything in Maya and export directly to my dev kit. No need to go into a secondary engine like UDK, set up things there, assemble the scene and then export to the dev kit.
How does that work for characters?
ya i worked with game engines that have a builder app that watches your project folder for new files and automatically converts anything that gets saved there.
than there is unity that will actually just fire up maya in the bg when it see's a mb or ma and make a fbx out of it.
also in the case of ND if it is there server that is bringing it all in engine, maya can run cli only to do simple tasks and runs on linux servers also, so it might be on the server and exporting it all out to what ever the game engine wants.
We do have a stand along program that reads what our Maya files are in a super condensed version so Designers can set up spawning and scripting shit, so I guess that is kinda like UDK, but really they are just using the level geo as a reference of where to place in game triggers.
At least background stuff is as simple as that. Anything that moves such as characters will require a bit more work for things like rigging/animation, but it is more or less the same principal.
also allows for some more complex stuff when placing objects too, i remember a talk where ND was showing how they rigged tree roots, so they could easily wrap them around things in level, as a way to add variation to trees, while using the same mesh, and texture.
being able to just have a environment come into engine exactly how it is in maya really opens up a lot of possibilities.
Its possible with any 3d modeling program. We used Max up at Bungie and it was the same thing. Export directly from Max to the 360.
I think a lot of people have a big misconception that most studios have an engine like UDK that everything is placed in after its created in the 3d package and then from that engine, exported to the dev kit.
I would say its possibley half proprietary engine (exporting from your 3d package to dev kit) and half external engine (something like udk, source, frostbite). This of course just a while guess based on friends I know at various studios/talks with co-workers who have worked at numerous places.
I think if you work mostly for smaller studios, you'll use more engines like UDK, especially since they're cross-platform.