I am an artist, but of the kind who earns a living with this and works in poor game studios, where one have to make life easy to coders.
Yup, there's such kind of artist, too
Unluckily, lately I have to invest my time more on uglier things rather than freely help.(which I like)
But some tips :
- There are already great scene formats, not fully or not supported at all in irrlicht. ASE and VRML. Good news is both support many scene features. ASE is the standard scenery asci export. You may parse from tehre easierly.
Another ways were a kind of maxscript that exported in a game ascii easy to parse (lol, I have done some programming, and were parsers, indeed, but very simple) so for you to extract from there what you need to put into you game/engine or own binary game format.
So you can use the work made by others to extract all what is evil from a huge Max scene...and just deal with what is dumped in that ascii file by certain plugin or by certain format (vrml, ase...)
So, if I remember later on (insert bunch of job hours here) I'll give here the url of the script, and also extra info.
To say I am allways CURIOUS (nothing more, nothing less) about pipelines for scenery in Irrlicht. If you give back your results later for irrlicht comunity (specially if is not something incredibly hard for comunity to go updating as Irrlicht versions get upgraded) , it then would be interested to see.
I cannot do a max scene for you, can do in other packages, or can do in Gmax (more similar to Max, but definitely not the same. Yet though, most of those materials are present, but export ins WAY cut in Gmax.There are some script that almost for sure can be used in max.)
I would not work really in any free project (other than help to Murphy's lightmapper) but can help in bits like giving u a BASIC scene with the needed features of your friend's scene but in gmax, just exported witha format or script also usable in max.
I don't ensure my collaboration.Just a possibility.But only if you are really desicded to solve your problem with scenery export and irrlicht and actually gonna give back the solution to comunity.Then I may help (I have -zero- gain here, like any help to irrlicht. Call me a freak, more than anything)
You're right...but what can You say to a guy that have a model of 58Mb in max with 300 different materials where each material has 3 textures ( bump specular and normal ) and that are trying to complete is thesis compiling his project in Irrlicht?
X,D
It made me really smile.
I feel your pain.
And can perfectly imagine the situation. The heck, I really know it.
List me the needed features of the scenery (ie: - bump, environment, multi subobject(let's hope is all simple standard materials!!) or single material,)
...then I *may* help.....You need an small scene, probably in a more human readable , ascii format, to parse from there, with basic cubes, but with all features. Then add your coded solution.Then go an try the big huge scene from your friend. Or those are my 2 cents of an euro.
ps: there are also some GREAT already done formats, ie the xml like one of my firend Murphy, MIM format, with tools like OBJ2MIM to help inusing any package. Would be painful though with a glorious huge max level with all those material specs and features; OBJ format is not that rich....and what is worse, obj exporters in 3d package are suporting terribly the format features, which are way better andmore powerful than it seems. Yet though, it has its limits, not the greates format for a really complex scene of these days. The way of hackery though, can be used to mount a pipeline based in OBJs, but the experience tells me is that with average user (not to mention the average coder) is WAY better a one button whole scene export.