Artist's Corner

Re: Microsoft's Models

David Hunt — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:10:14 GMT

BShields:
David Hunt:
What gets me is this: Ok, all you hobbyists who just got a free compiler and free framework, now it's time to shell out a grand on a modelling package so you can write your hobbyist games. I don't think so. I don't have that kind of money to spend on a hobby. Convincing my wife I needed a new computer was bad enough. ;)
Be a 2D hobbyist? ;)

I am. I'm too old to start mucking with 3D! ;-)

Re: Microsoft's Models

BShields — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:55:01 GMT

David Hunt:
What gets me is this: Ok, all you hobbyists who just got a free compiler and free framework, now it's time to shell out a grand on a modelling package so you can write your hobbyist games. I don't think so. I don't have that kind of money to spend on a hobby. Convincing my wife I needed a new computer was bad enough. ;)

Be a 2D hobbyist? ;)

Re: Microsoft's Models

xPox — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:36:40 GMT

I'm curious to know what hacks you are talking about regarding Blender. I've been using Blender for my 3D modeling for several months now, and I'm not having any problems.

Re: Microsoft's Models

kierepka — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:36:13 GMT

TrueSpace is now free:

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2008/07/23/announcing-truespace-for-virtual-earth-3d-development.aspx

Registration is here:http://cart1.caligari.com/web/Truespacemainreg.aspx

Re: Microsoft's Models

David Hunt — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:33:44 GMT

jwatte:
...considering all the snow we had to walk through on our way to school, uphill, ........

... both ways. ;)

Re: Microsoft's Models

jwatte — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 01:08:31 GMT

First, if you have 3ds Max, then I recommend the kW X-port plug-in, as it supports shaders, texture re-naming and re-basing, and a few other neat things, as well as slicing the Max time-line into multiple named sub-animations with separate time scales.

Second, if you can't afford Max, then I can recommend the following tools:

Blender -- Free, but needs hacks. It's open source, so you can fix it, though.
DeleD -- Inexpensive (or even Free), and doesn't need hacks. Doesn't do animation, though, just static models.
Milkshape -- Inexpensive, but needs hacks.
gameSpace -- Inexpensive, doesn't need hacks.
trueSpace -- a little more expensive (around $500 IIRC), but a full-featured tool

Then, there is also the XNA partner -- the XSI mod tool for XNA! It sounds almost like exactly what you're asking for, brought to you through action by the XNA team.

You young'uns don't know how good you have it. Back in my day, I had to work the early shift for two years to buy a home computer with three kilobytes of RAM! That's when we had electricity, that is, which wasn't often, considering all the snow we had to walk through on our way to school, uphill, ........

Re: Microsoft's Models

Bubba — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:24:52 GMT

Carrara from Daz3d.com is still a good buy with all of it's fbx export problems (no fbx animations but it does export x file animations that worked with the skinned animation sample). FragMotion is great for 25 bucks, but only your static models, I think you could work around with the mirror skelton transforms in FragMotion and get it's animations to work with xna. Ultimate 3d is a great convertor, but major memory hog. None of these guys fbx files worked correctly with the skinned model sample. When I imported dude (X file version converted by Ultimate3d), half of his skelton was in reverse that's why I think FragMotion has the functionility but I haven't had the time to figure it out.

Re: Microsoft's Models

David Hunt — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:28:35 GMT

I wasn't suggesting that Microsoft provide a modelling package, just import support. Given the problems people have had getting decent .X or .FBX exporters for the hobbyist packages to work with XNA without hacking, manual editing, etc., it just seems that more direct support for one or more of those formats would be a good thing.

I'm afraid I'm pulling this thread off-topic, so I'll let you respond if you wish and leave it at that.

Re: Microsoft's Models

Pfo Cubed — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:22:57 GMT

The lack of a modelling package is not Microsoft's fault, really. They do not make a 3D asset utility, otherwise we'd get Microsoft Model Maker Express Edition, or something similar. I find the content pipeline to work fine with Wings 3D, which is free, cross platform, and quite a few years old. Milkshape and Blender are an option as well, and they are either low cost or free. DeleD is another modeller, that has a free version or a $100 pro-version, and it is good for making static geometry like buildings. Several example importers exist for DeleD, and I think writing one for XNA would not be too difficult (it's on my todo list).

Re: Microsoft's Models

David Hunt — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:15:33 GMT

What gets me is this: Ok, all you hobbyists who just got a free compiler and free framework, now it's time to shell out a grand on a modelling package so you can write your hobbyist games. I don't think so. I don't have that kind of money to spend on a hobby. Convincing my wife I needed a new computer was bad enough. ;)

What we need is a workable way to get models from something other than the Big Two packages into XNA without hacks. I don't know if that's Microsoft's job or the community's, but it would be nice if Microsoft added support for some of the hobbyist-level packages.

Re: Microsoft's Models

Joopsy — Thu, 10 May 2007 06:06:48 GMT

I have to say that I agree, 3d content creation (and importing) is very tricky.

I have plumped for blender, and I have gradually got together a process for making models, texturing them and exporting them, but it has been tricky.

(very very simple models, no bones, single mesh)

Although the information is out there on how to do stuff, it is very dispersed. If someone started an XNA-Blender site, that had end to end examples and documented the odd little nuances, I could see the combination quickly becoming very attractive to newer developers.

Good luck with your modelling!

Re: Microsoft's Models

CSPHD — Wed, 09 May 2007 21:03:59 GMT

Scripts are fine and dandy and at the end of the day, working on a commercial project, most likely the way to go. The point of this thread was that XNA (which is great! don't take this as bashing) is being touted as a way for "hobbyists" to get into the scene, but writing scripts to import and export models is still a pretty steep learning curve.

Going from creating a colored triangle and importing a model snagged from the SpaceWar starter kit to exporting and animating a skinned mesh is a huge jump. Someone somewhere at Microsoft knows how to successfully export a model from some program; learning how to do this the way those who created XNA had in mind will be the least likely to be broken in future releases, and is probably the simplest way as well. Then, once you've got the basics down, you can choose whether you just want to do something cool or go for deeper understanding of a particular aspect of the process.

Re: Microsoft's Models

poopa — Tue, 08 May 2007 20:28:10 GMT

That's why I like simple blender with python and open scripts clearly readable and editable.

Re: Microsoft's Models

Glenn Wilson — Mon, 07 May 2007 19:15:07 GMT

Most of the formats have been readable, but having the ability to remove the need to manually edit the file would be better. It would reduce the risk.

Re: Microsoft's Models

freqout — Mon, 07 May 2007 04:24:13 GMT

the latest .fbx exporter from Autodesk for Maya allows you to export in ascii format. If you export in ascii, the file is human-readable and you can huntdown the texture path and change it yourself.