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Issues with converting/exporting existing assets

by Tom Dowd · in Artist Corner · 05/08/2007 (6:27 am) · 1 replies

We seem to be having significant problems exporting nearly any low-poly assets that were not specifically build for use in Torque. In short, we've been attempting to build an asset library for out students here at Columbia College Chicago and have repeated failures converting these purchased assets into something Torque friendly and exporting them. We are following the instructions on the exporters.

I understand the general vagueness of this question, but I was hoping that someone might have some general guidelines or suggestions that might prove useful without going into the specifics of why particular objects are failing.

(Also posted in the Maya exporter thread.)

Tom Dowd
Columbia College Chicago
http://game.colum.edu
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Torque Owner Tom Dowd
Columbia College Chicago

About the author

Tom Dowd is a 25-year veteran of the game design business with credits on the PC, Xbox, PS2, NES and Genesis. He is an assistant professor at Columbia College Chicago in the Interactive Arts and Media department teaching in their Game Design major.

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    Associate Logan Foster
    perPixel Studios
    #1
    05/08/2007 (9:15 am)
    The biggest problem I found when purchasing assets from a 3rd party source and trying to get them Torque compatable was with the sloppy and shoddy work (in general) that you get from buying 3rd party assets. 9 times out of 10 the artist that build the assets designed them for VFX (rendering), unfortunately this means that they are also usually polygon heavy and constructed via dubious methods.

    As such the best thing I found was spending an hour or two just cleaning up all the crap that these guys left in their art. This meant welding verticies, fixing UVW data, doing polygonal reduction, turning edges, rebuilding faces, redoing bitmap textures and fixing up material definitions within your 3D application. If you are using 3DS Max like then the STL check modifier is a bit friend of yours for this sort of stuff.

    Once you are certain that the model is functional from a raw polygonal level, then its time to get it ready to export for Torque. Generally what I will try to do here is get it exported quickly as a static shape that I can view in TST Pro and then continue on from that.