Software for the Realtime 3D Modeler? 204
Milo_Mindbender asks: "I've been involved in doing a number of games and other realtime 3d apps and I always run into the same problem: the 3d modelers that most artists use (MAX, Maya, Softimage, Lightwave...etc) are all heavily biased towards doing non-realtime rendering using raytracing or some other technique. While they can be used to make models for realtime 3D hardware, a very large number of their features don't map well onto realtime 3D hardware. For example many of the procedural shaders used by these packages map very poorly to a hardware shader's abilities, and similarly, if you want to use a hardware shader on some polygons, most modelers give you no way to see the effect while modeling."
"There are other problems too: modelers that have no concept of polygon strips/fans or that make it very hard to avoid generating polygons that will never be seen (the inside surface of a pipe for example). Even if you have the target 3D hardware on the modeling machine, it's rare to have the modeling windows look anything like the finished product. I'm wondering if anyone has run across a good solution to this. Possiblly a modeling package more geared to hardware capabilities, or some way of adapting an existing modeler to make it more hardware friendly by blocking or modifying features that 3d hardware can't handle. It would seem such a package could be cheaper too, since it wouldn't have to support as many fancy features."
MultiGen (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MultiGen (Score:2)
Multigen Creator can do multitexturing, but it doesn't give the user any way to set the blend level between the layers. Use two textures and get a 50% blend. Use 3 and get 33%, etc... blech.
Detail texture application didn't work right in 2.05 (when I got away from it).
It doesn't do keyframe animation. That's a show stopper right there.
It doesn't support hardware shaders. It's only OpenGL based, so vertex and pixel shader playback would be done completely via vendor specific extensions to OpenGL.
The list goes on and on.
Creator tried to bust into games. Unfortunately for Multigen two things happened:
1) The ability to do amazing graphics on PCs exploded very quickly in the timeframe between the orignal GeForce card and the GF3 card.
2) The market for PC based military flight simulators dissapeared. Since Creator was (and still is) marketed as a military and civil engineering vis-sim tool it is best suited for those types of products. You'll never make a Quake III, Tribes II, NWN, or GTA3 with it.
Re:MultiGen (Score:1)
Blender? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Blender? (Score:3, Informative)
They might be going Open Source, but they have made some demands like they need to get $100k (Euro, ~95k US) in user donations before they open up the source code...So its not a sure thing.
Re:Blender? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Blender? (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't even get me started on the lack of features in every other aspects. I still think it's amazing how people seriously compare simple open source hacks with commercial packages that are in a whole different legue. Photoshop vs Gimp, Blender vs Maja, Reiser FS vs Veritas, Postgresql vs Oracle.
Re:Blender? (Score:1)
Re:Blender? (Score:2)
A simple fact: If the product doesn't cater to the needs of the professional user, it won't be used by professionals. Maya does, Blender doesn't. There is a great deal of tedium that can be done manually, but with little justification that it should be - in many cases (but not all), this has less to do with one's skill, and more to do with one's desire to produce something within a reasonable time frame and within reasonable cost constraints.
Re:Blender? (Score:2, Insightful)
It is made easy to save multiple versions. By hitting the '+' button upon save it bumps up the file a version number. I find this better than undo, because it forces me to work in steps. When you have an undo, alot of time you end up with one file. On all my models, I usually have over 50 seperate versions saved. This allows me to go back at any point in time and start from a certain level.
Why not use ReiserFS or Ext3 on top of LVM if you need point-in-time backups?
Use of a DMBS is different, you must select the proper one for the task. That is only common sense.
Re:Blender? (Score:2)
Re:Blender? (Score:3, Insightful)
That there is complete and utter bull.
The goal of an artistic program is to allow the artist to move their creative vision from their mind (or some other medium if it has already been copied down to it) to the computer with AS LITTLE FUSS AS POSSIBLE.
The program should be natural and easy to use, should work flawlessly and efficiently, be quick and obvious in its usefulness, and all in all feel like a tool and not like a burden.
And that is in the bare minimum.
A truly good program heightens the artists creative potential but offering up new ideas. While it is technically feasible for an artist to use nothing but a pixel by pixel 2d editor to create any image that you could see on your computer screen (and indeed some artists do create that way and do a lovely job of it, they have darn near total understanding of color theory and how the human mind interprets shapes and shades), the rest of us (none artistic-genius types) have to rely on mere external tools to aid us in this process.
Thus why a water effects or flame effects plug-in in Photoshop comes in so much handy. Sure the 'real' artists do it by hand (and yah, odds are their results look a darn fine deal better too), but hey, for those of us who still have a vision but lack that level of understanding about color theory (how to make something look like it is underwater by tinting the pixel just right), the plug-in sure comes in handy.
Of course in the case of some tools even
or better yet somebody start up a fund to send copies of some of those books to the smaller dev teams out there, I realize that not every programming team (especially when it comes to OSS) can afford a usability study, but there is still no excuse for the major UI blunders that any of the so called alternative programs out there make.
Not sure what you're looking for (Score:3, Interesting)
It does sound like you're looking for something more in-tune with hardware realtime rendering, am I correct in thinking this?
Most programs have an OpenGL/D3D/etc realtime modelling mode, so I guess what I'm asking is, are you looking for something that can give you an accurate representation of what it will look like when rendered in game, using a card's built-in shaders? I guess I'm just getting confused on what you mean by mapping. Are you talking vertex/polygon level procedural mapping, or texture mapping, or what?
I'm also asking these questions so I can guage what a low-poly/gaming modeller is looking to accomplish. All my 3d renderings are done in trueSpace, using raytracing or a hybrid of radiosity/raytracing.
low poly modeling - modeler shell (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not sure what you're looking for (Score:2)
There are some improvements coming... (Score:4, Insightful)
LW's VIPER is pretty interesting too. What you do is you do a test render of your object and the resulting image is stored in a buffer. Then, let's say you want to play with the surface texture on it. Fire up VIPER and it shows you a low res version of the image you just rendered. When you modify the surface, it re-updates that image preview, but it only re-renders that particular surface that you're playing with. It's much faster feedback for getting a feel for procedurals than a full bore-render.
Is it real time? Ehh.. no. It's close. 2-3 seconds maybe? I agree with the author, though, that more could be done. Why couldn't they convert a proceedural into a texture and present that in OpenGL?
The good news for the author is that the industry (not just Newtek and Discreet) sees the value in having more real-time feedback. The next couple of major releases for the main packages out there will be very exciting for just that reason.
Re:There are some improvements coming... (Score:2)
Damn I thought I remembered reading that. *digs through the manual again*
Thanks man!
quake? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why Quake isn't good for modeling. (Score:3, Informative)
These are very quick for real time play, because world is broken up into subspaces and placed in a binary tree when the wold is pre-render compiled for the game.
all of this breaking up takes a hell of a long time, it's also a slow process to merge the subspace trees whenever a space changes, this is why it's all pre-rendered and shiped with the game.
So the quake engine isn't good for dynamic real-time modelling, but it is good for realtime play with a fairly static world.
Here goes 2 comments part 1 (Score:3, Interesting)
And you'll have to do a veiw page source for the correct formatting!
Here's a simple 2d 4 wall world in ascii
\ /
--- \ /
| \
| \
I'll call the walls
\ = A
-- = B
/ = C
! = d
draw a line through the world along line A,
this PARTITIONS the world into two BINARY spaces. B and D are on one side(the space infront) of the partition and and C are on the other side(the space behind).
so we have a partial birnay tree
A
/ \
B+D C
each node can only represent one line through the space
The space infront has two walls in it, B and D. So partition the space infront of A down line B. This gives you D infront of line B and nothing behind line B
The binary space partition looks like this
A
/ \
B C
/ \
D []
Re:MODS ON CRACK (Score:2)
Re:MODS ON CRACK (Score:2)
- HeXa
Re:MODS ON CRACK (Score:2, Insightful)
Mods, please read this entire post before moderating, I get to the point in the last paragraph.
Just because a poster may not be verbose or even have a full understanding of the topic matter doesn't make a post off-topic. Instead, it is an opportunity for geniuses like yourself to give input. What you are reading right now is what we like to call a "discussion forum", where people come to talk. This occasionally means intelligent discourse instead of the tripe you're serving today.
As far as the subject at hand, I think that using the de facto game engine as the basis for a modeling tool isn't out of the question at all. You already have an API to move objects in three dimensions. You'd have absolute WYSIWYG if you used the quake engine as the basis for the game. Does "common sense" mean never using a readily avaiable codebase for a novel purpose? Bah. If you are making models for games, then why not use a hacked out game engine to do the modeling, like many game companies are doing internally anyway?Re:MODS ON CRACK (Score:1)
The Quake engine is too "old school" for the precision required in professional 3D modelling. Using a modified version in realtime might be good for Quake level development but that is for a different purpose. Quake like engines are good but limited in their ability. The DOOM 3 engine is getting closer to the image complexity of what is more realistic and therefore useful, but still not what you could call multipurpose.
I would hazard a guess that custom designed graphic engines would be needed, not adaptation of engines designed for other purposes.
- HeXa
Re:MODS ON CRACK (Score:2)
This is the ultimate in real-time preview
Greetings,
Re:MODS ON CRACK (Score:1)
I did not mod that post offtopic - I have no idea who did - I was just trying to guess what the "mods" thinking was
- HeXa
trueSpace 6 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:trueSpace 6 (Score:2)
Just so it isn't completely offtopic though: tS6 also will "bake" the shadows as part of the mapped UV surfaces of the meshes/polygons.
Windows only --so far. (Score:2)
Re:trueSpace 6 (Score:2)
Which is why tools are so important... (Score:5, Interesting)
I write engines now, but I spent a good 10 years as lead programmer of tools groups at various game companies (I distributed the first public reverse-engineering of 3ds file format, I think for version 2, had fun explaining that to a room full of lawyers... :)
I'm still dealing with these issues today. My current employer is starting a major project (MMORPG), we spent a decent part of the last year researching art tools. Ended up picking Maya, as its got a great C++ API that exposes darn near everything, as well as a great C++'ish scripting language for the technically inclined artists to use. (Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in Maya, etc...)
The problem is that it takes years to tune a decent editor - I started out in CAD/CAM/CAE and even I know better than to try and editor unless I've got a few man years to dedicate to infrastructure.
Unless the budget absolutely cannot handle it, I'd recommend taking Max or Maya and extending them with your own tools. Maybe even make some of them open source, like Pierre Terdiman did with his Flexporter [codercorner.com] system for Max, which saves a good man-year of work on 3ds Max exporter work!
Re:Which is why tools are so important... (Score:2)
You're obviously well more knowledgable in this area, as I have never done anything in the 3d game area, but most of the requests I see for low poly 3d modellers for games ask/demand that the user is proficient in Max.
Re:Which is why tools are so important... (Score:2)
Which is interesting, given the likelihood of the average hobbiest/graduate owning a paid license for MAX is somewhere around... oh, let's see... uh... ZERO.
And, like all technical skills, proficiency in any other 3D package is less than useless. So all the nine-hour-a-day Blender people needn't bother.
Re:Which is why tools are so important... (Score:1)
I was lucky enough to go to a uni that had both Max, Visual Stu(with all the extras) and a room full of Yaroze's(yes I know outdated but its still a good start towards Sony hardware- and it was 3 years ago).
Of course theres always other ways to do these things - like the number of people with Warez MAX/Maya/Vis Stu Ent or a homegrown PS/DC dev system(I havent seen a homegrown PS2 dev system yet).
Re:Which is why tools are so important... (Score:2)
I would like to throw in my tidbit here and mention that Max sucks for modeling.
I do not know if they have gotten rid of that stupid separate rotate view tool yet though, I certianly hope so, the second/third/forth/fifth/sixth/seventh/eighth/ ninth mouse button is there for a reason. . .
(yes my mouse really does have 9 buttons on it.
Rhino3d is my prefered modeling tool.
Max does rock for setting stuff up though, and doing animations in it is pretty darn intuitive, but ick, the interface . . . .
Oh well, most of the major packages DO have a cruddy interface, heh. and tend to degrade the qualify of a modeler's work
Re:Which is why tools are so important... (Score:1)
Drat, I thought I did the first 3ds doc.. [google.com]
Jim
Re:Which is why tools are so important... (Score:2)
I'll dig up the old docs for integration into what's still public, if anyone is interested, I looked over the docs Google found, and I had a bunch more chunks documented, especially animation, and all the material data...
Re:... tools ... (Score:2)
Try these (Score:3, Insightful)
Milkshape rocks! (Score:2, Informative)
Klowner
Re:Milkshape rocks! (Score:1)
Multigen's Performer or Creator (Score:1, Interesting)
Blender (Score:5, Informative)
Visit Blender3d [blender3d.com] or elYsiun [elysiun.com] and help open the source on this program. It could become THE gaming modeller for Linux.
Re:Blender (Score:1)
Re:Blender (Score:1)
I was playing with LW some time ago and the layout only seemed to have 1 level of undo. (I might be wrong here since I've only spent very little time with it yet)
That's not much more useful than no undo at all, since you still have to resort to saving all the time.
How lame to have to type a subject (Score:2, Informative)
Gmax (Score:1)
Re:Gmax (Score:1)
Try this one: (Score:1)
It lets you write your own OpenGL renderer for a whole 3D window, or just a specific Geometry.
Modeling and compositing (Score:3, Informative)
Multigen only (Score:1)
But it exists only on Windows NT/2k or IRIX. there is no real stuff for Linux or no equivalent on free platform i know.
I'm will also very interested to know if there is other good realtime software.
Re:Multigen only (Score:1)
whats the problem? (Score:3, Informative)
As for your problem with procedurals... Well, procedural textures are, for the most part, 3D textures. Which means you do not need UV coordinates to map an object with a procedural. You can, either by script or plugin, "bake" the procedural into a bitmap and use that.
You also have options to send data in any format you choose to another viewer. There are tons of options available. I dont see why choosing a more limiting system would make life easier. As porjects change, you may very well like the versatility your "fancy" application affords you.
Re:whats the problem? (Score:2)
Greetings,
Maya (Score:1)
Thanks,
Me
Max4 shaders (Score:1, Informative)
Didn't Max4 add the ablity to execute DirectX 8.1 shaders for its real time rendering so artists could preview exactly what they were getting?
XSI might help (Score:1)
If you got some time (say, 3 months) you can get the free Softimage XSI Experience CD set from www.softimage.com.
Have patience (Score:4, Insightful)
"Hardware capabilities" doesn't have a single definition. Are you talking hardware like the Radeon 8500? (which is pretty sweet and fairly common among gamers) or are you talking hardware like the graphics chip in the Intel 810 motherboard set? (which is pretty weak but extremely common among the general public). Believe it or not, a huge number of games are still spec'd to run on low-end chipsets like the i810 because thats what consumers own. Sure, everyone you know has an 8500 or a GeForce4, but you're not a normal person if you're here reading slashdot. Normal people have old machines with slow graphics cards. A modeler that was designed for 8500 cards would be next to useless on a project aimed at i810's, and vice versa.
More importantly, "hardware capabilities" doesn't have a static definition. Graphics hardware is subject to Moore's law (except that the doubling time is even shorter than for CPUs). In the 12-18 months it would take you to write a high quality hardware-oriented modeling tool, graphics chips would run through at least two, possibly 3 generations. Do you design for the current hot chips, since those will be fairly common by the time your software is ready? Or do you try to guess what hardware will do in 18 months even though only a few hardcore gamers will own cards with those features when your tool is released?
Lets assume you've figured out whether you are going for serious gamer hardware or mass market hardware, and you correctly predicted what year you were targeting and guessed the feature set perfectly. Lets even assume you've written it and finished debugging it. Six months later (when the next generation of chips arrives), do you (a) throw away all your work or (b) invest another 6 months completely revising it because NVidia just announced some whizbang new feature that your user interface can't support?
Chances are, whatever you decide, pretty soon you'll find yourself doing exactly what Alias|Wavefront and Discreet and NewTek and etc. are trying to do: build the very best modeler you can, and let the hardware vendors catch up. You don't need that many more doubling times before all those slick features are "hardware capabilities."
Have patience.
Nvidia's CG & Softimage|XSI (Score:4, Informative)
-- Zbrush -- (Score:1)
3ds max is the solution (Score:2, Informative)
really though, i think your question is silly because you want a procedural modeller, not a polygon based one like versions of 3ds prior to it becoming 3ds max. procedural modellers allow you to go back through the stack and modify parameters, rather than deleting and recreating to change something.
because of the procedural nature of modellers, the polygon geometry that the renderer uses has to be regenerated everytime you make a change, which is slower than manipulating polygons directly.
other modellers probably have the same shader previewing functionality now, or the ability to create plugins to allow them to. i can't speak for them though because i'm only familiar with 3ds max.
Re:3ds max is the solution (Score:1)
1. write a render plugin to do it.
2. 'scuse the french, but you're fucking nuts unless you have a card that does 64 - 128bit colour rendering like modellers do. cards are also designed for realtime rendering, and as such are full of tricks and hacks to get the speed at the sacrifice of quality.
Re:3ds max is the solution (Score:1)
The future of game content (Score:2, Interesting)
Traditional content development is a long arduous pipeline. Skilled artists trained extensively in high end proprietary software packages create fat content chunks that get ground through this pipeline and end up in a game, presented via the engine, as polygons with textures or music or what have you. It's expensive, wasteful, and a prohibitive barrier to entry for indie developers.
Ultimately, the only part of the pipeline meaningful for a gamer is the output - what's in the games. But, the more flexibility and power a content pipeline is imbued with, the bigger the payoff is for gamers and developers.
So, the question then is how to we get from the grinding fixed pipeline to something elegant and useful. The best possible future is for content creation to change in a few major ways: to be immediate and in realtime, to be in the game engine itself, and to be mostly procedural to satisfy these constraints. This isn't simple, but here's a quick outline.
Part one requires the pipeline be as short as possible. Instant game feedback means no extra turnaround time for revisions.
Part two is to have our realtime zero-length pipeline in the game engine itself, so the game, which is the game content, is a self supporting environment. The engine becomes not only the output method, but the development host. The best way to change a game world is obviously from within the game itself (sound familiar? that's how the real world works).
Part three is the magic that makes this possible. Procedural content capability changes the entire outlook of what is possible to do in a game engine. Procedural content is more flexible (since it's programmable), more lightweight (since the descriptions are effectively code - even if you model them through a different interface), more distributable, more scalable, more unique, more immediate
The next John Carmack won't be a game engine guy, he'll be a game CONTENT engine guy.
And that, temporarily, is the end of this story. Game content creation is basically in the dark ages because these parts haven't fallen into place yet. Nobody has this together yet. Someday this will be real, and we'll look back and think of current content as being like coding assembly instead of using high level languages.
When game content is capable of really expressing what's in gamers' imaginations and dreams, well, then we'll have quite a party on our hands.
Re:The future of game content (Score:1)
Most current content authoring tools are specialized data manipulation facilities. "Isn't everything on a computer data?" Right, but manipulating what is essentially the output data directly, even from a high level, is more than a little stupid. It's what's done because it has always been deemed necessary, but it's not very smart.
To start working with procedural content, you need content tools that are about modeling processes. Now, not everyhing can be a runtime process (yet) because things like radiosity computation are freaking slow. But, and this is important, fun game content that's interactive and interesting is several orders of magnitude more important than having the prettiest most "realistic" (don't make me laugh) game content. This should probably be enshrined as BIG IMPORTANT RULE #1 or some such.
Anyway, modeling processes that 'create' the content is not entirely different from modeling the physical processes of how that content came to exist in the game world. It really is a form of simulation, that while not necessarily anything like the 'real' physical processes that shape our world, that will give life to games that just can't be manufactured by hand.
The computational process of simulating the modeling processes will be the next big thing.
you are right, but.... (Score:1)
the purpouse of softwares like Maya, LightWave, POV, Cinema 4D, 3DS,
Using Maya as a modeler to export objects for a game you are writing (or whatever) is convenient because you do not have to write a modeler by yourself, but do not expect an "Unreal engine"'s quality result in the modeler.
Anyway most of those products are supporting OpenGL. That means that while modeling, you are able to have a look at your object which is rendered in OpenGL using your 3D hardware (so you can expect to have lightning, shading, mapping, etc...).
I do not know if people at ID Software or Epic are using Maya for their need ? Or if they have their own modeler ?
The software isn't the problem... (Score:1)
Save the whole kludge as a
Heres what you need... (Score:1)
search for Wings 3d. Its an open source polygon modeller that works similar to Nendo. However it is written in a language called Erlang. It runs on Windows, but you have to download the Erlang interpreter from Ericcson.
This is all you need for making the actual models. OpenGL support, fast modelling, mouse emulation for the popular 3d apps, and features are being added every day. Exports/imports 3ds, obj, and vrml.
Then use max or something to UV map, and you are set.
Try Animation Master (Score:1, Interesting)
what about milkshape... (Score:1)
Softimage XSI 2.0+ has fairly nice RT tools (Score:1)
What someone really needs to invent is (Score:1)
We wrote our own (Score:1)
I spent a while trying to convince Maya to support the particular type of higher-order surfaces we needed for our game. Due to bugs in the Maya API though this couldn't be done - so we decided to write our own modeller.
just a thought. (Score:1)
im not an expert in this, but i thought id throw the idea out their so maybee someone smarter than myself could expand on it..
alias|wavefront showcase.... (Score:1)
showcasing (read: showing movies)
about how games developers have used
Maya
http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/What
this includes:
tekken 3 (namco)
gran turismo 3 (polyphony)
crossfire (EA)
certainly worth a look
.
How we manage those problems (Score:1)
We had nearly all the problems you are describing therefore we decide to write a built-in viewer/exporter for 3DSMax (3.1). It was quite a difficult task (doc suck IMHO) and requires nearly one man year of work, but I think the result worth it.
It uses our game engine (InVivo) to display in RealTime a view of your model. This view display the materials as defined in our Shader Editor, therefore we specify all our shaders (shading, z-buffer writing, Back Buffer blending, alpha test, stencil buffer, ambient, diffuse, specular, emissive) in Max and Artists can view the result as if the model was in our game engine in RealTime. Then we just had to plug our exporter and you can export our scene. We've also add animation and a particule plug-in we developed to Max and now Artist don't have to exit max to do all game assets.
Code some plugins and use the functions (Score:1)
You have some of the possibilites you are
askin about. In 3dsmax as it is. If you want
to have the very exakt procedural textures in
max as you have in your game. - You can always
code a material plugin for yourself. (the SDK
is bundled with every copy of max). And you
can use it in 3dsmax as a material. - Then you
can render a texture from your material. - To
get a snapshot (you can render animated
textures as avi's to) to get an idea how it
will look. - Of course you will never get the
EXAKT view you will get from your own 3d
system. But that would be hard. - Maybe you
can make a preview plugin or something along
thoose lines, to use your own real-time
renderer in max. And if you look att gmax you
have the core framework of the 3d package and
can build any plugins you want for it. And you
can also bundle your plugins and gmax with
your games for the players to have
mod-capabilites. And for the omptimize issues
you are talking about. You can always use the
optimize modifyer and of course you have to
think yourself what is going to be visible or
not. - I think you would get pretty pissed if
max deleated faces/polygons that was supposed
to be availible if it tought they wherent?
=)
realtime+3d (Score:1)
Gmax? (Score:2)
http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax/
You also might want to look at Cg from Nvidia if you want more control over how stuff looks when rendered, although its not a modeling program. From what I understand it would give people better control of the hardware, and it probably makes it fairly easy to use the pixel and vertex shaders..
I hope it helps..
Everyone seems to have the wrong idea (Score:1)
There is a major problem here though... the max renderer is not the renderman renderer is not the maya renderer is not the lightwave renderer is not the game's render engine.
Basically, none of the render engines are really comparable as they all do different things differently and to different degrees of accuracy (such as how renderman doesn't do any of the nifty lighting affects found in brazil).
So my answer is this... have your engine programmer write a plugin to whatever renderer you do use so that rather than rendering from the program, it renders using the game engine. This sounds kinda obvious, but i'm not sure how difficult this may prove to be. But this will solve the problem of not being able to see how it is supposed to be in game (without having to export the blasted thing everytime you want to load it in the game).
Re:Everyone seems to have the wrong idea (Score:1)
Unfortunately this is one case where experience is invaluable. Someone who has a ton of experience will know as they are modeling how it will look in final form. It's a hard skill to develop and requires deeper knowledge than just x colors look different in the console vs monitor.
Wings3D, a Free Nendo clone - Linux, OS X, Windows (Score:1)
Wings3D is Free Software, and it's already surpassed Nendo in many areas. The user experience is unmatched - closer to modeling with clay than I've ever got on a computer before.
There are versions available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, and if you want to make a port to your favourite platform or add your favourite feature the source code is available.
Download Wings3D immediately, you'll never look back [wings3d.com].
--
What about MultiGen? (Score:1)
Stupid Followup question (Score:2)
I'm not a game programmer nor a graphic artist. Can someone explain to me why I'd want an API library to the tool that designs my models? Once my model is in my MMPORPG is it going to call a Maya library function in-game?
Re:Stupid Followup question (Score:2)
We're using the Max SDK and MaxScript to create a suite of tools that run within Max that are specifically tuned for our game development path.
Why re-invent the wheel (polygonal modeling, vertex animation, texture UV application, etc...) when an off the shelf product can provide that functionality? Then, you use the provided APIs to extend that tool to fit your needs. Both Discreet and Alias/Wavefront market their products to game developers as a sort of graphic-design middleware. It's a good solution.
Write a viewer (Score:2)
It's not that tough to attach a real-time exporter to most 3D modeling packages. Most of the major game development houses have some facility for displaying what's in a 3DS/Maya scene in a linked up game, whether it's running on an XBox, a GameCube or under Windows.
On top of that, you pretty much need to write your own tools to help artists spot abuse. Add a wireframe mode to your game, and tag all double-sided or currently-reversed polygons with a dot in the middle. Something that simple can point out poly overpopulation or wasted polys pretty quickly.
New on the scene (Score:1)
SoftImage XSI 2 (Score:1)
Milkshape (Score:1)
http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/
Max and Maya (Score:1)
Both max and maya can be adapted to do some or all of what you want. It is fairly easy to build you game engine into Max or Maya so that it runs with the model in a preview window at all times. In the past year or two, Game Developer Magazine has run articles on doing both things. You might be able to find the articles at gamasutra.com (some articles from GDM end up being published there as well).
Along with this, you can add tools for carefully controlling the blending and hardware shading as data attached either by uv maps or stored per vertex.
As to fans and strips, it definately would be possible to make an exporter that would automatically do this, but not nescesarily in an optimized manner. I'm fairly confident that it would be possible to write plugins for both that add fans and strips as a new object type, but I'm not sure if it would be worth the effort. You also might be able to do it by storing extra information along with each triangle saying what strip or fan it belongs to.
The great thing about Max and Maya isn't their built in tools. It is how programmable they are. Thus they are best used when they are being used as the foundation for writing your own production pipeline you can do everything from integrate in your own asset management system, to adding modelling plugins to help, to storing all sorts additional information per vertex or per triangle (or per whatever object type), and then integrate in whatever animation tools you want, whatever special effects you need, what ever exporting, rendering, and post processing you might need. There really is pretty much no end to what can be done too those programs.
The Software You Want (Score:1)
solution = new hardware (Score:2)
TOUCH-101 = Real-time Procedural (Score:2)
try: http://www.derivativeinc.com/ [derivativeinc.com]
they're the guys that INVENTED procedural real-time 3D graphics...
Derivative is dedicated to advance the way people make art. Derivative produces innovative tools for designing and performing interactive 3D artworks and live visuals.
Touch 101, the Derivative product family, is a new artform which enables you to create interactive 3D visuals for the web, interactive art installations and live performance. Touch is a unified content development environment that combines 3D modeling, animation, MIDI sequencing, QuickTime mixing and more.
regards,
j.
Maybe I can clarify some things (Score:2)
1. EXPENSIVE--I realize they are selling to a small market but it is very pricy to give a large team of artists their own copies of Max, Maya or whatever. It would be nice if these companies at least offered a version without the film-quality renderer, which game artists rarely use (ok, cutscenes maybe, but other than that who needs it?)
2. Lets you do things that don't translate to hardware well:
- non-power-of-two textures (no way to force the modeler to reformat the textures to a sensable size)
- inefficient primitives (no way to remove interior polygons in many cases)
- no way to lock out features that hardware can't reproduce, like some procedural textures.
3. Poor support for things hardware DOES support.
- Triangle strips/fans, no way to generate, see or edit them IN the modeler, particularly editing-in points to corner-turn strips.
- Hardware shaders, no way to see them in the preview windows
- Poor support for baking lighting info into textures/vertices
- Hard to preview art in different rendering modes (bilinear, trilinear, AA, ansitropic filtering...etc) to determine what looks best.
4. Poor capabilities for optimizing models.
- need tools for removing invisible (interior) polygons
- need tools for turning texture res up and down to quickly find the resolution that looks the best and resampling/filtering textures.
- better support for generating Levels of Detail
- No good way to track the texture/polygon budget of the model you're working on.
- Poor support for making multiple versions of the same model (ie: when you want to make varients for cards that do rendering/shading in different ways, want to do high/low performace versions of a model...etc.
I certainly don't expect the modeler companies to produce something where the preview output will be an exact match for my engine. But it would be nice if they had a lot more "hardware friendly" modes so you don't have to spend a lot of time training artists what features of their tools work and what don't, or teaching them to "guess" what a particular effect will look like when done on the hardware.
I've had to write a LOT of different kinds of exporters/postprocessors to do these kinds of things and it's quite a bit more difficult to do, for example, triangle strip/fan generation in an exporter than to have the modeler generate properly stripped/faned primitives in the first place. (ie: make a cylinder as one strip and two fans PLEASE)
Sure, you can fix some of these problems with plugins, post processors, exporters...etc, but almost all of them are ten times easier to fix if you do it in the modeler itself.
A plug for MindsEye (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:NURBS (Score:2)
Actually, it depends on the modelling method/output of nurbs.
From what I understand, nurbs can often be beneficial in some rendering situations, or their outputted/exported polygonal equivilants. However, from what I understand again, this is not for realtime, so my point may be moot.
Re:NURBS (Score:1)
Re:NURBS (Score:1)
Re:The reason (Score:1)