GATOR was developed for/with one of our main game customers, Square I think. I'm not aware of a Gator "sdk", what is that? There are attribute transfers in other apps, but it's generally separate tools for textures vs rigging things, reflecting on their architecture vs XSI
On 27 May 2015 at 19:27, Matt Lind <speye...@hotmail.com> wrote: > For the record, GATOR was introduced in late 2005 with XSI v5.0, not in > 2008. > > GATOR was largely tailored for those switching applications and doing > rigging in a film/video pipeline. For games development, GATOR has less use > out-of-the-box as the very things that made it nice for exchanging data > between XSI and Maya, for example, were the very same features that tripped > up game artists trying to do simpler things quickly in heavy repetition. > > I wrote a command based version of the tool using the GATOR SDK as artists > needed more micro-management of meshes and transfers. Artists used it to > transfer UV's, normals, vertex colors, envelope weights, and many other > features. I also extended, as well as exposed, many features from the SDK > GATOR did not expose directly such as transferring attributes in local > space, by raycasting, distance limits, transferring only selected > subcomponents, correcting numerical flaws found in UV transfer, and so on. > However, my use of the GATOR SDK was not limited to replicating the tool as > a command. I also used it heavily for other tasks which weren't strictly > related to attribute transfer tasks such as animation remapping, pose > transfer, mesh fitting, and interactive editing of normals and symmetrical > envelope weighting of asymmetrical characters. > > To hear other applications don't have a GATOR equivalent in this day and age > is surprising considering it's so universally useful and isn't rocket > science to develop. If you know anything about tree data structures and > linear algebra, you can write your own (even if it's not as efficient as > GATOR). What makes the GATOR SDK nice is the algorithm is very fast, > accurate, and relatively easy to use. Reverse lookups of subcomponents is a > pain as GATOR worked on triangles, not polygons, but that's minor compared > to all the benefits it provides.
