max collada plugin feedback

I have tried the new release of the Max COLLADA plug-in and it is still broken!

Are you guys at Discreet taking Collada seriously?

You ask for feedback and yet you seem to ignore it. I fixed some bugs and submitted the changes to the board and direct via a message to one of the moderators of the max collada plugin and heard nothing back. I don’t mind if you don’t use my code as-is, please re-write it as you need, but please take notice as the code would help many more people.

I wish I could supply you with the files I am exporting, but I’m not allowed to. I may be able to make some test files however.

Problems (some of which I provided fixes for):

  1. File contains duplicate ids. The same <image>s , texcood arrays, materials are being output multiple times.
  2. Animation <arrays> are claiming counts of 201, but there is only 1 item of data.
  3. Doesn’t export specular maps and bump maps for materials. It ignores the maps assigned to those channels in the materials. I understand this feature is not implemented.
  4. The name attributes of the <texture>and <material> nodes in the collada file have ‘crazy’ names with hex values in them. Please make them nicer names which are closer to the original names in Max. They don’t need to use crazy names, because they don’t need to be unique.

Questions:

  1. In the test results it claims that ‘export with baked matrices’ passes. I understand that to mean that <transform> elements will be output for nodes and for <animation>; as that is what is done in the Maya exporter. But how is this activated for the Max plugin? (I can’t even see anything in the code that would write it out or activate it).

  2. Can we submit code patches to you?

  3. Where and how should we provide feedback?

We’ve been looking at the 15 September drop of the Collada exporter. This caused problems on a lot of machines until we discovered that we needed d3dx9_24.dll in Windows/System32

Most machines didn’t have this .dll though, in somecases having newer versions.

Though people might want to know.

Cheers

Jolyon

Thanks for the info. I’ll ensure our artists have the same dlls.

The problems I found were relating to issues in the exported Collada files themselves.

Hi Kevt,

Are you guys at Discreet taking Collada seriously?
I understand your frustration and I try below to answer your questions. Before, I want to reetirate the fact that Discreet does take COLLADA seriously. As a matter of fact, Friday Sept 9th, we signed a contract with Feeling Software (which is doing the Maya exporter/importer). They will help us on the completion of the exporter and the development of a C++ importer.

You ask for feedback and yet you seem to ignore it. I fixed some bugs and submitted the changes to the board and direct via a message to one of the moderators of the max collada plugin and heard nothing back. I don’t mind if you don’t use my code as-is, please re-write it as you need, but please take notice as the code would help many more people.
We are looking for feedback and do not ignore it. Before Sept 9th, Bernard took over COLLADA. He was new to COLLADA and the code. As you may understand, it took him some time to get up to speed with the specs and the code.
In addition, I was on vacations all August and missed the code you sent me. I am still going through the tons of e-mails I recieved.

  1. File contains duplicate ids. The same <image>s , texcood arrays, materials are being output multiple times.
    This bug is now logged into the COLLADA bug database.
  1. Animation <arrays> are claiming counts of 201, but there is only 1 item of data.
    Do you have the repro steps? Were you exporting animation of a transformation or another parameter? With this information, I will be able to log it.
  1. Doesn’t export specular maps and bump maps for materials. It ignores the maps assigned to those channels in the materials. I understand this feature is not implemented.
    Correct. This feature is not supported. I add it to the COLLADA bug database to keep track of it.
  1. The name attributes of the <texture>and <material> nodes in the collada file have ‘crazy’ names with hex values in them. Please make them nicer names which are closer to the original names in Max. They don’t need to use crazy names, because they don’t need to be unique.
    I suppose you refer to the attribute ‘name’ of the <texture>. and <material>. I log it.

In the test results it claims that ‘export with baked matrices’ passes. I understand that to mean that <transform> elements will be output for nodes and for <animation>; as that is what is done in the Maya exporter. But how is this activated for the Max plugin? (I can’t even see anything in the code that would write it out or activate it).
The data is exported but you are right the expected elements are not in the file. I logged a bug against this.

Can we submit code patches to you?
Submit them to Bernard and Guillaume from Feeling Software. With Guillaume on board with us and now Bernard up to speed on COLLADA, you should see quicker responses. If you don’t see the appropriate responsiveness, let me know. If you do see improvements, comments are also welcome :slight_smile:

Where and how should we provide feedback?
Keep it in this topic. As I said, you should see quicker response.

Regarding the DLL problem, other users spotted it and Bernard posted an addendum to the thread indicating the version of the DX SDK the plug-in was compiled against.

I have tried the new release of the Max COLLADA plug-in and it is still broken!
Stay tuned! You should see a lot of improvements in the coming weeks. But be patient for the importer.

Thanks for your report. We will make sure this does not happen anymore.

Regards,
Jean-Luc.

Are you aware that the 3ds Max forum on these boards is locked so that only moderators can reply to or create threads? I PM’ed blef about this yesterday but it’s still locked. Kind of hard for us to give you feedback if you don’t let anyone post in your forum.

Hello,

You can give feedback using email, pm or in public forum.
Thank you,

Bernard

Feedback goes in the Public Section, either Design Discussion or Implementation Discussion depending on what the subject is.
The partner section is only for partners to post messages, not for feedback.

Regards

Will the 3ds max exporter support the skin that use physique modifier?

Thanks,

Hi,

Thank you for reporting this physique modifier issue.
It is now corrected and will be available in the next release.

Regards,
Bernard

This one is a show-stopper for me. I will be interested in knowing when this is fixed.

Another problem that I have is this:


<library type="EFFECT"></library>

My schema validator chokes on it because EFFECT is not one of the enumerated types. Is this something that is going into COLLADA 1.4?

The EFFECT problem is not as big an issue for me since it is easy to manually edit the file and remark it out. The id bug is much harder to patch since it requires trying to figure out which node was intended.

This one is already solved in version 2.0 that was released 22/09/2005.

Thank you for reporting this.

OK, thanks.

Here are the schema validation errors I am getting with 3dsmax Collada exporter v2.00.

  1. “uncompleted content model. expecting: <source>”

This error goes away when I remark out the following:

“<library type=“ANIMATION”>
<animation id=“lunarModel2.max_animation”>
</animation>
</library>”

It looks like the empty “animation” element is missing required “source”, “sampler”, and “channel” child elements.

  1. “attribute “name” has a bad value: “Map #0” does not satisfy the “NCName” type”

This error goes away when I replace " #" with “_” so that all names like “Map #0” become like “Map_0”.

  1. “attribute “name” has a bad value: “_1 - Default” does not satisfy the “NCName” type”

This error goes away when I replace the spaces with underscores.

  1. ““1-_Default2” is used as an ID value more than once”

I thought this might have been one of the bugs that was fixed in 2.00 of the exporter. This is where I stopped as this might be too difficult to manually edit.

I got these errors because my XML-to-object parser automatically does a schema validation. Please recommend schema validation tests to the exporter developers.

Hi,

I have found some Problems

  1. It doesn’t export baked materials. I did a test with a box and a render to texture to get a lightmap and it ignores the map generated on the exporter.

  2. In multitexture.dae file of sample data

<polygons material="#Default" count=“720”>
<input semantic=“VERTEX” idx=“0” source="#revolve-lib-Vertex"/>
<input semantic=“NORMAL” idx=“1” source="#revolve-lib-Normal"/>
<input semantic=“TEXCOORD” idx=“2” source="#revolve-lib-map1"/>
<input semantic=“TEXCOORD” idx=“2” source="#revolve-lib-map1"/>

0 0 0 31 1 1 32 2 2 1 3 3</p>

Is correct the fourth input? I think that idx value is wrong and it should be idx=3.

Hi,

THanks for reporting your problems.

Regarding 1., can you provide us a example illustrating your problem?

Point 2. is a topic to bring to the COLLADA forum. But the fourth channel is perfectl valid. In this case, your second texture uses the same tex coords.

THanks,
Jean-Luc (with the help of Guillaume).

It would help to know a little bit more about what validation tool are you using? and what test data are you using?

The COLLADA Conformance Test Suite has a Xerces based validation tool and uses it to validate each exported file for the test cases that are part of the suite. The exporters for Max, Maya and XSI are all supposed to be tested by this test suite prior to release.

I am using the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) with validation enabled. I am also confirming the errors by manually checking them using a plain text editor.

The test data was provided by one of our artists who exported it using the 2.00 exporter. The data is available upon request.

Sounds like a good policy.

I wrote a post two weeks ago.

I was looking for self ilumination’s slot in ColladaExporter.cpp and I have not found it.

I would like to know when the collada exporter will support all the material slots of a 3DSMAX material- Currently ID_DI, ID_SP, ID_SS and ID_BU are only supported.

Thanks

Hi Toni,

I’m currently answering this request. Sorry if the original request was lost. I’m confident this change will make it to the next release. Here’s the list of the token used for each texture slot:

ID_AM - “AMBIENT”
ID_DI - “DIFFUSE”
ID_SP - “SPECULAR”
ID_SH - “SPECULAR-LEVEL”
ID_SS - “SHININESS”
ID_SI - “GLOW”
ID_OP - “OPACITY”
ID_FI - “FILTER”
ID_BU - “BUMP”
ID_RL - “REFLECTION”
ID_RR - “REFRACTION”
ID_DP - “DISPLACEMENT”

Sincerely,
Guillaume Laforte
Feeling Software Inc
http://www.feelingsoftware.com

are there any plans to support the output of this material? It would be tremendously helpful.

Also, are there plans to support per-vertex animation?

By the DX9 shader Material, I’m assuming you’re asking about ColladaFX. In the more recent exporters, if you click on the experiemental export option for ColladaFX, you should get quite a bit of exported information about ColladaFX. That’s still experimental, so the exported information will change in the near future to conform with COLLADA 1.4, but for now, try it out. If there’s some information that is missing and that you would like us to export, please contact us. Feedback on the COLLADA tools is always appreciated :).

About per-vertex position animation, that feature is not lost, preparatory work is happening, right now, in order to be able to export that in the near future. It is definitely in the list of features that we will add.

Sincerely,
Guillaume Laforte
Feeling Software Inc.