Blender export - there has to be an easier way
by Richard Ranft · in Artist Corner · 03/11/2014 (8:45 am) · 23 replies
Seriously - I spent two days going in circles trying to export a model of Earth to COLLADA and get it into Torque 3D. TWO DAYS. Make a simple sphere. Add a material to it. Add a texture to that material. Export. Big gray ball.
So I ended up re-installing 3DS Max 7, exporting to .3DS, converting to FBX 2013 and then to COLLADA using Autodesk's conversion tool. Aside from some name length issues this works perfectly and the conversion tool can do batch conversions (hmm, wonder if I can script it....). Now I have Earth and Luna in T3D after a total of 40 minutes (25 of which was spent troubleshooting an issue with Luna's texture image).
What am I missing?
So I ended up re-installing 3DS Max 7, exporting to .3DS, converting to FBX 2013 and then to COLLADA using Autodesk's conversion tool. Aside from some name length issues this works perfectly and the conversion tool can do batch conversions (hmm, wonder if I can script it....). Now I have Earth and Luna in T3D after a total of 40 minutes (25 of which was spent troubleshooting an issue with Luna's texture image).
What am I missing?
About the author
I was a soldier, then a computer technician, an electrician, a technical writer, game programmer, and now software test/tools developer. I've been a hobbyist programmer since the age of 13.
#22
07/13/2014 (1:24 pm)
Nice Richard. Yes this same concept applies with the .xml data. Luckily the read/write functions were well-documented for the .xml stuff. Since that's dealing specifically with .xml, it's easy to learn with the documentation. I start to get confused a little when I'm trying to read/write just any file. I'm just not entirely comfortable with those functions yet. Things like: isFile, findFirstFile, etc.
#23
Since TorqueScript is "known" but more complex my search is messier....
07/13/2014 (2:34 pm)
XML is nice because it's a well-defined markup language and the system is already set up to read it. This is where TAML would be nice to have in T3D, and where a custom TAML visitor class would fit. In Three Step Studio we used a TAML visitor to go through all game levels and remove scene objects or change scene object properties so that you could change objects and then update them across all levels that used them.Since TorqueScript is "known" but more complex my search is messier....
Torque Owner Richard Ranft
Roostertail Games
The idea is that you read the datablock file line by line and try to replace a part of that line with what you're looking for. If the line contents have changed then you've found your line. Then you just figure out how to get what you want from the line. Searching script code like datablocks is pretty easy because it has a fixed format that you can rely on.