Greetings all. I've been lurking on the forums for a while, but have never posted. I'm a senior artist at the MOVES institute and have been working with Brad for a while now to help streamline the OSG art pipeline for our Max artists (and hopefully also the community at large.)
OSGExp has treated us extremely well up until we needed to build and export a complicated model hierarchy or create articulated parts for a model like the Sim community has been able to do with other tools for quite some time. Many of the higher end functions of OSG were simply not available for inclusion to 3ds Max users. The changes/additions Brad has made for our local version have opened up a whole new world of Max modeling options for OSG assets. I think many of the limitations with the exporter stemmed from the difference between how OSG and Max handle groups and hierarchies. The "children" of OSG helper nodes (ie: the geometry pointed to by an OSG_LOD node) were never recognized as "linked" to anything by Max...they still showed up on the scene root in Max (which meant that you could move/alter parents without any relation to the children.) The OSG Node "children" just get held in a dataset until export when they get properly ordered in the Scene Graph. To complicate matters even more...If you ever tried to Max-link an OSG helper node to anything else in the scene it WOULD show up as "linked" in a Max schematic view, but would then get re-ordered to the scene root on export. While we all appreciate the importance of backwards compatibility, none of the changes that Brad has made so far 'break' any older model created with the use of helpers from older versions of OSGExp. However the functionality that he has added with the creation of group nodes and the ability to hierarchically nest OSG nodes has exposed the problem/question of how to best handle parent-child relationships without the two different systems fighting for control? For what it's worth from an artist's perspective... In moving forward, I truly hope that the exporter can focus on the best and most unified way for Max artists to create and export the highest quality OSG models possible. It would be extremely nice to use the MAX-based linking throughout...so that what you build and see in a schematic view in Max correctly represents how the Scene Graph will export. This change would indeed alter the behavior of older Max files build with the previous OSG helpers, but I look at it this way: If for some reason an artist needed to go back into the Max file and make a change to it for a new export...we'd be offering an opportunity for them to upgrade their models at that time and export them in all the splendor that they hoped for in the first place. -Will -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of A.J. Jessurun Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2006 12:36 AM To: osg users Subject: Re: [osg-users] OSGExp Hello Brad, I could not say that there are currently any developers of OSGExp. Me, like a lot of people use OSGExp in projects and during those projects we find bugs or features we need, and then solve/add those. I give a high priority to backwards compatibility. It would not be nice to reexport a project and find out that it doesn't behave as before anymore. Most of the time I solve this by adding an export option that turns certain behavior on or off. Maybe such a solution is also possible with you fixes. I am very interested what you have done, and would like to take a look at it. My time is limited, but maybe I can include it so that other people can also use it. I know a lot of people are interested in osgSim::DOFTransform support for OSGExp. Greetings, Joran. Anderegg, Brad USA wrote: > Hi, > > Due to recent requirements of some projects I have updated the OSGExp > for 3dsMax to add support for osgSim::DOFTransform nodes. I also fixed > a couple of issues with the exporter which were stripping out the OSGExp > Helper hierarchy on export. In doing so, I had to break the support for > linking objects in the max hierarchy sense, which only seemed to work in > certain cases originally anyway. And so the only way to form an OSG > hierarchy in max is through the OSG Helpers, in order for this to work I > also added support for a Group node. > > Although I would like to fix support for max linking and possibly remove > support for adding children through the helper, this would be a major > overhaul and I have run out of time to work on it. So I guess my > questions are: What direction are the OSGExp developers going in, and > can we agree on a single solution for forming a scene hierarchy in max? > and finally are the changes I made relevant to anyone in the OSG > Community that would like to adopt them or expand upon them? > > > Brad > > _______________________________________________ > osg-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users > http://www.openscenegraph.org/ > _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/ _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
