i working on a RT preview tool for my assets, right now i have a little engine that renders models textures effects and lights, with their respective animation, with control to go fordware pause rewind etc.etc.etc. also it lets change the anim clip of the current obj.

now i working on a plugin for max and maya to stream the process a little bit and build upon my current pipeline. so i basicly want to export directly from maya to the RT viewer to check how would my asssets look in the engine.

my problem comes at the point of the XNB files, i been searching without success for a way to create the XNB files without compiling in visual studio so i can build the respective assets and move them to the corresponding folder for the preview.

any help with this guys?.

also could there be any posibility of streaming this process for the xbox360 too?

so it seens i need to look better.

visual studio uses MSBUILD to compile everything in the project. so i only needed to edit the .proj(xml) file and add the content i want.

Ex.
<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
    <ItemGroup>
      <WildcardContent Include="OutputFBX/*.fbx">
        <XNAUseContentPipeline>true</XNAUseContentPipeline>
        <Importer>FbxImporter</Importer>
        <Processor>AnimModelProcessor</Processor>
      </WildcardContent>
    </ItemGroup>

    <Target Name="BeforeBuild">
      <CreateItem Include="@(WildcardContent)" AdditionalMetadata="Name=%(FileName)">
        <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="Content" />
      </CreateItem>
    </Target>
  </Project>

and them call "msbuild foo.proj"

this way i get all the new XNB files in the content folder and them call my viewer from within maya or max.

i will be setting up a blog to show the viewer and some post on how the process went. including the max and maya plugins

MSBuild also has a .NET object model, so you can build up a temporary project entirely in memory and build it using an API call, without even needing to call out to the external msbuild.exe process. This sample shows one way to do that.

Looking forward to seeing the blog!

thanks a lot shawn, i will look into it and the blog will be coming some time soon, just finishing some articles to publish it.