What's the best way from maya to Irrlicht animation mesh

ccloveaa · Post by **ccloveaa** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 10:11 am

can someone tell me What's the best way from maya to Irrlicht animation mesh?
i search all the forum, but can't get the answer.

CuteAlien · Post by **CuteAlien** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 12:16 pm

The best way is to make some example models with the features you need. And then test all the exporters you can find and look how the models look like in the irrlicht meshviewer.

In our projects we used so far a combination of .X for animated models and .obj and some own format which is similar to .obj for static meshes.

Matthias88 · Post by **Matthias88** » Wed Jan 06, 2010 11:48 am

Hello everyone,

I have just recently started to work with Irrlicht and so far it seems to be a really nice engine. The only thing thats really bugging me is that i cant seem to get my own animated models out of maya and into irrlicht!

Can someone please tell me, which file format i should use? And if there are any plug-ins for exporting animated meshs from maya to a format, that irrlicht can read?

I have already been spending the whole day now searching all over the internet for ways to export my model to any format supported by irrlicht, but so far i wasnt able to find a single plugin that lets me export to .md2, .md3, .b3d or .ms3d format. The furthest i got was the direct-x exporter mentioned in this post: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... ++exporter. That one i got to export my mesh properly, but somehow it seems, it doesnt export any skeletons and animations, i have no idea what the problem might be...

So if anyone has experience with the mentioned XExporter plugin or knows about any other way of how to get my animated models from maya into the irrlicht engine please help me out. I'm totally lost.

thx a lot, greetz

Matthias

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Wed Jan 06, 2010 11:54 am

Quoting myself from an old topic:

bitplane wrote:I think from Maya you have two proven and tested routes..
1) The Maya X exporter that comes with the DirectX SDK, but you'll need to compile it yourself
2) Use This MELScript to export your bone based mesh, open and save again in an old version of the DirectX viewer, then open in Irrlicht.

Not many programmers use Maya because it's so expensive, it's mostly 3D art/animation students, software pirates, and people at big companies with a large budget and an army of programmers. So there's not much support for Maya in Irrlicht.

Matthias88 · Post by **Matthias88** » Wed Jan 06, 2010 12:03 pm

Hi bitplane,

Thank you for the fast reply.
The melscript was the one i meant, i didnt get it to export my skeletons and animations, only the mesh itself. Do you know more about it? What the problem might be?

As for the Maya Exporter included in the DirectX SDK, i downloaded one from microsofts website (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... 71b7bd369c) but unfortunately it didnt work with my version of maya. Was that the one you meant? or is there another one? Do you maybe have a link where i can get it?

Thx again,
Matthias

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Wed Jan 06, 2010 12:16 pm

I'm afraid I don't have any more info and can't test any of this as I don't own a copy of Maya, my friend was using it when he was at university. We did get some reasonable results with the melscript exporter, but I don't know what version of Maya that was.

Matthias88 · Post by **Matthias88** » Wed Jan 06, 2010 12:21 pm

Ok, hmm... which modelling software would you suggest as an alternative or can you say, which one is being most used in combination with irrlicht?

i know only maya, because its the one we are using at the university, i havent been working with anything else so far, i didnt think, it would be this hard to find a way to get my models into a suitable format with it

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Wed Jan 06, 2010 12:31 pm

Blender -> B3D, X or MD2 (MD2 for WinCE or iPhone)
3D Studio -> X
MilkShape 3D -> MS3D or X

There are others, like Anim8or, but the ones above are the most popular and have had the most testing with animated models.

Matthias88 · Post by **Matthias88** » Wed Jan 06, 2010 12:35 pm

Alright, thx a lot for the support.
I have already taken a quick look at milkshape too, but it wasnt able to import any files in the free trial version. Maybe i'll take a closer look at blender then...