Macintosh tools that work with Torque

#1 Lightwave is the main 3d app for MACs I belive, and there is an exporter for it.

#2 For models, Blender, Maya, and Lightwave are the best bets. While they have .map exporters, the tools themselves aren't really made for them. The guys making the exporters have done a great job, but it's like forcing a square CSG peg into a round polysoup hole.

I haven't tried QuArK with VPC, but I've heard that it works with the newest version. It would be interesting to try Cartography Shop as well. I use my Tablet PC for my interior editing, so I haven't pushed the CSG envelope on the Mac.

#3 Quark doesn't work with VPC but Hammer does.

Also there is a GTK Radiant CSG modeler for Mac.

I think that should cover all availble apps.

#4 Almost

I use Blender for the DTS objects and Radient for Interiors. I'm only in prototype mode and won't sell what I'm making so I don't mind using Radient.

For the free version Benoit and I are working on a Blender exporter for Maps which does have it's advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages being that it's one tool for all art. Another is that it will allow you to get a nice final render of your interior objects for Box art and other marketing type things. There are other advantages as well.

The main disadvantage is that it's a pain to make sure objects butt up to each other and not overlap each other. As I understand it, this is a big deal when dealing with the CSG compilation. But I could be wrong.

Finally, for the Mac you can use JQT from what I understand. I have the source and I want to bring it up to speed but time has not allowed me to do that.

I hope this helps,
Joe

#5 One of the problems with creating a CSG exporter is training the people who are using their favorite modeling program that they can't use it the way they want and have to make concessions that will change as the exporter develops. I love the work that the people who have been working on .map exporters are doing, but I found it quicker and easier to learn QuArK than to try to unlearn common precision polysoup methods that I use when modeling to work within the context of an exporter. Probably just me.

I believe when using JQT, you have to reload your maps in QuArK or hammer and then save them in either Valve 220 or Quake 3 format for them to compile correctly. It's been a while since I used it, though.

#6 You make a good point about making sure the objects are convex and not concave. But I plan to create a function to highlight any objects that are not convex. Of course I can plan to make a function to build from your imagination automajically. :) I have not idea when and if it will be working. My job, prototyping and life are taking too much time for me to polish off the blender exporter.

Anyway, I think JQT writes in Quake 3 format allowing you to use the -q 3 switch for map2dif. But not sure, I haven't had time to look into it quickly.

#7 The convex vs. concave thing is really an issue. The overlapping of objects is not (at least not in Torque), as you see from this screenshot (two overlapping boxes):

#8 Your correct, when the objects are overlapping it will compile the dif. But does it make the csg in the most efficient way? Does it use more or less surfaces when it tries to merge the two brushes? And most importantly will it cause light leaks?

#9 I believe that a lot of it will depend on tagging things correctly as detail brushes for export. Though I'm not sure where in the process the face breakout occurs. Being able to detect overlapping faces after creating the convex hulls from the polygons and then correctly applying the right tagging to make sure that there were overlapping and invisible to the eye is a project that I don't want to think about. Luckily, there are many people who thrive on solving problems like this. I'm just not one of them. Correctly tagging faces in the modeling application is the user-end solution to this, though I often wonder how friendly that would be.

#10 I prefer engines that allow you to use a generic 3d format with direct export from a 3d app. Allthough you do need more experienced artists who know how to optimize. In my experence you get far better results often with fewer polys being rendered. Just depends really. Ideally you would have a hybrid that builds optimized geometry for you, seperating convex and concave geometry and building a new scene that combines both, that worked really well at lightspeed games.

I just found a cool middleware max exporter that would be ideal if torque was more flexible, it includes a importer DLL making the whole art pipeline a little easier www.easeproduction.new.fr/

might be usefull for people that hang out here that don't use torque. Only found out about it today and might be trying it out in our own new openGL engine. If anyone's interested I'll post what happens.

#11 I'd love to know. I'm always interested in valuable tools, even if I don't use Max. I still like to know what's "out there".

#12 Ok, I 'll do that, My first attempt at exporting wasn't great lol. But thats because our current max exporter has a custom material type that supports all the native engine brush features. The new exporter only reads the standard max material . So I'm going to have to convert all the materials over. In my case thats pretty easy as we have a script to convert between the two.

Anyway, once we have the import library set up with our engine, I'll start a new thread, will probably take a couple of days to get it all up and running in trinity.

Little Update *******

Well it looks pretty good, but unfortunately the import DLL is both a blessing and a curse. Since our engine is multiplatform we cant use a DLL which means this exporter for now is tied to the windows platform.

Was mostly interested in it due to it's support for more than 2 UV's and more supported mapping types than our otherwise excellent exporter. Specular maps and bump maps that were currently implementing in a roundabout way heh.

#13 Good news the easy export import lib site has been updated, free source code avaliable for download so now your not stuck with a DLL :)