Newbie Scale Question

If you are a new Irrlicht Engine user, and have a newbie-question, this is the forum for you. You may also post general programming questions here.
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yikyak
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Jan 13, 2004 1:54 am

Newbie Scale Question

Post by yikyak »

I'm trying to 'sync' 3ds max and Irrlicht's scalarities, so there's a definite fixed ratio correspondence between units used in 3ds max and units used in Irrlicht.

Just what are the units used in Irrlicht, and what do they correspond to? Are they similar to unreal's units?

I've been playing around, and have had no trouble scaling stuff in software, but I'd like to design and construct stuff across a consistent benchmark between applications.

Does anyone have any experience of this, or any advice?

Cheers
saigumi
Posts: 921
Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2003 11:31 am
Location: St. Louis, MO USA
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Post by saigumi »

I'm not sure what the unit conversion is, but I do know that 1 Milkshape = 1 Irrlicht.

Is 3DS anything like Visio, where you set your scale somewhere in the properties?

Since I can't afford 3DS to try it out, here is a 1x1 Milkshape mesh that loads 1x1 in Irrlicht.

www.saigumi.net/1x1block.ms3d
Crud, how do I do this again?
yikyak
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Jan 13, 2004 1:54 am

Thanking you muchly, kind sir

Post by yikyak »

That was very useful.

Discoveries so far:

a 1x1 milkshape block is exactly the same size as a 1x1 3ds block when 3ds's units are set to 'generic units' and not 'metric'/'imperial' etc.

When I convert 1x1 'generic units' (gu) to metric (m) inside 3ds it resolves/converts as:
1gu == 0.01m == 1cm

When I import the same shapes back in from outside, if I don't 'convert units' it stays as 1x1gu, whereas if I do it converts to 2.54 = so obviously it thinks I'm doing an inch=>centimetre conversion.

So, in short, if you always work in max units, these equate directly to both milkshape and irrlicht units (makes sense - guess it's just a '1' in the code), and as such 1 unit == 1 cm.

As an interesting aside, both .ms3d files and .3ds files align themselves in irrlicht space in excatly the same way, but if I export to maya .obj format, the alignment is ~0.5 irrlicht units off in the negative Y and positive Z directions. Either the .3ds and .ms3d shapes align themselves to their XZ centre point, and the .obj shapes align to their XY centre point (or an equivalent translation) OR my 3rd party .obj exporter is b0rked.

Many thanks again.
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