Hello everyone, I hope someone can answer this question that I ahve because it is really bothering me.
I created this world for my game in 3d studio max but I’m not sure which file format i should export it as so that loading it in opengl wouldn’t be that hard. If anyone knows which is the best file format to export it as that would be a great help. Thanx!!!
If you’ve drawn the world in 3ds max, the you’ll probably need to do some sort of computation on it to make it feasible to display it in an opengl application. Personally, I draw levels in 3ds Max, export them as ASE files (file->export), then use a program I wrote to:
split large meshes up into smaller objects
split vertices to allow correct normal/texture coordinates for each point (3ds max doesn’t really do this explicitly)
calculate visibilty data - you can’t just draw a 200,000 polygon level every frame and get a decent frame rate
You can also write a plugin for max to export to a file format that your game will understand, or even more easier, lean the MAXScript utility (very easy, don’t take more than half hour to understand) and create an export script. I did that, and was able to import textures, pre-calculated normals, all the complicated meshes. Just have to be careful, because the system coordinates of MAX are different from the opengl, but that is just a matter of inverting y and z coordinates…