Hi Kim,
So, I would be very interested to know what exporters (commercial or free) people are using to get their models out of Max and Maya and into OSG.
Right now our own content pipeline is a bit convoluted (modeling in Maya, then convert to flt to insert DOF nodes in Creator, and read those flt files or convert them to ive for faster load times). However lately I've tested a few alternate paths because we'll need to be able to export animation soon, and the current path won't support that. You can check the archives for the discussions I had on the list at that time, but here's a summary.
What I've found is that both the fbx and Collada formats work well. I've tested with Maya 2009 and XSI Mod Tool 7.5 (which is pretty much the same as XSI 7.5 for my purposes, since it exports Collada and fbx just fine and I don't need to do any rendering in it).
The fbx export in both softwares has a small problem exporting materials correctly in my tests, they always export phong (specular) materials even if you assigned lambert (diffuse only) materials. And fbx from Maya had problems exporting animations, but I didn't have time to dig deeper, maybe I was doing something wrong. But Collada worked flawlessly in both softwares.
Now, I don't know about the situation for Maya 2010 or Max 2010 (or any version of Max in fact). If indeed the feeling software exporter doesn't work or there's no trial, it may indeed be hard to evaluate. Perhaps you can ask the company for a short trial license to be able to evaluate it? Sometimes if you ask they'll do it, even if it's not said explicitly on their site.
Since all three packages are now owned by Autodesk, I would have expected all three to be the same in this respect (they could share exporter code pretty easily I think), but in my testing this wasn't the case. Luckily the Collada export was good, but fbx (which is Autodesk's own interchange format, ironically) didn't export correctly as I said above. It's a bit frustrating to have tools that can't talk to other tools easily - I fully support the open source philosophy of avoiding vendor lock-in, and if our artist was open to learning other tools I'd suggest blender in a heartbeat.
Hope this info is useful to you. Note that it's just my experiences, YMMV... J-S -- ______________________________________________________ Jean-Sebastien Guay [email protected] http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
