Maya8 -> Collada -> JavaGame

hello,
we are developing a game in java, that heavily uses skeletal animated characters.

in order to get the models into the game, we are considering of using collada.

our artist creates all character models using Maya8, but unfortunately i did not find a collada exporter for Maya8 yet. does one exist?

the only java library that reads collada seems to be whoola, unfortunately i could not find any documentation on it. we are using an internal format to store the vertices, bones, skin weights, etc. so we would need to convert the collada data to our own structures. are there any other collada loaders written in java?

thanks a lot!

Hi,

maybe you find the answer regarding the Maya exporter here:

https://collada.org/public_forum/viewforum.php?f=5&sid=a9e73edcbdc5fd4ae34623d809d1c229

Cheers Norbert

thanks, but it seems feeling software has only exporters for maya up to version 7.

As far as I know, the Whoola COLLADA Library is the only publicly available Java implementation for COLLADA 1.4, closed source or Open Source.

It is Open Source so you should be able to dig into it to see how I did it. I can also generate documentation upon request. Here is what I have so far:
http://earth.whoola.com:8080/space/cyber/doc/collada/
http://earth.whoola.com:8080/javadoc/collada/
http://earth.whoola.com:8080/javadoc/co … mmary.html
http://earth.whoola.com:8080/javadoc/co … oader.html

Right now, though, my primary focus is on this:
http://croftsoft.blogspot.com/2006/09/jigl.html

Please feel free to call me if you have any questions:
(214) 636-3790 m

thank you, croft!

i’ll see what i can do with this documentation.
maybe i can get out the necessary mesh information. basically, all i need for an animated model would be

  • Bones
  • Vertices
  • Weights
  • Triangles
  • Texture Coordinates
  • Frames

(i need no normals ;))

so, is jigl a software implementation of OpenGL?

Regarding the Maya 8 exporter.

I have not tried this. It may not work at all. But…

Have you tried to recompile the plugin with the Maya 8 SDK? The plugin is opensource so you should give it a shot.

-Andy

I wrote more documentation today with an example applet:
http://earth.whoola.com:8080/space/jigl/