Thanks for the quick response.
You said “yet” does that mean that this feature is planned for sure?
Yikes! I’m in big trouble…as I bet a lot of developers will be when they find this out. The whole appeal of COLLADA to game tool chain developers is that for the first time in history, we may finally be freed from the huge cost and development time associated with having seperate tools for different DCCs and different versions of those tools that we have to recompile everytime MAX or MAYA or XSI release a new version.
You suggest compiling the plugin myself, and while that would work, it defeats the purpose of moving our tool chain over to COLLADA for the reasons mentioned above. If we do that, then instead of freeing ourselves from the maintainence of different tools for different DCCS, we’re back in the same boat PLUS we have a new plugin to maintain…COLLADA. Plus, it couldn’t be hardcoded to some default settings because the user may want to export different frames for different animation clips etc…
Also, most professional art pipelines are very user friendly and require minimum “repeat work”. That is, a Max Scene may contain terrain geometry, a lighting rig, a camera rig and maybe even a few models. Withough a silient way to kick off the COLLADA export, the artist/user would have to manually export each item and be presented with the current COLLADA options dialog each time and browse to a file each time. Very tedious and clumsy…
To be a little more concrete, we have an “Asset Manager” that runs within Max and maintains persistent information that associates a Max Selection Set with an export template. This information is set up once and in the future the artists only has to click “export” to have X number of game engine files exported. The files can be of any type…model, animation, skin mesh, terrain, light, camera… etc… Like I said the info is persistent and thus is saved with the Max scene file. For this to work with COLLADA, the Asset Manager needs to manage COLLADA options during the silent exports. For example, event just a single skin mesh character may have all of it’s animation stored in the same file. Say frames 0-30 are a walk cycle, 31-60 is a jump animation, and so on…not to mention that there is a skin mesh to export. That is easily 4 or 5 COLLADA exports just to get the skin mesh and associated sampled animations…
Anyway…I just wanted to provide some real world reasons why it’s crucial to have a silent export of COLLADA where maxscript can specify the options…at a bare minimum at least the frame range needing to be sampled for a particular animation.
Unfortunately, my journey with COLLADA ends here for the time being. I realize this stuff is still in it’s infant stages and the work Feeling Software and others have put into this is truly amazing. Congrats to all whos efforts have been contributed. But, at this point, I have to go back to our full C++ plugins where we were before we began this journey.
This may be nothing new to you guys who are working on the plugins…maybe you guys have plans for this?
This is something I’ve been worried about since the last PS3 dev conference…that is, seemless integration of COLLADA into existing and even new pipelines. Without that integration (silent export parameters), our old toolchains are far superior with regards to user friendliness and require less work.
Thanks for your reply again.
Good luck to all.
Regards,
Lynn