XSI exporter question

[jemsio]

My first post.....
And as a long-time user of various 3D tools and APIs (but not a strong C++ programmer), I just want to say that I'm very impressed with how quickly I was able to get up and running with OGRE in general, create an XSI to OGRE pipeline, and get tangible results. A testimonial to OGRE's O-O design and how well you guys have abstracted the low-level details. Fantastic job!

However...
It appears as if the XSI exporter does not support exporting instances (I don't see anything in the documentation to say that it does, but nothing to say that it doesn't either).

If I have a mesh object in XSI and create a row of them using instancing, then export, I only get the original object in OGRE.

So I'm assuming that the design intent is for us to do the instancing in OGRE, by creating additional entities through functions to build rows, grids etc.

IWBNI instancing was supported, as the tools to create reasonably complex arrays of objects already exist in the modeling packages. We are working with some complex arrays of scaffolding, ibeams, etc. in a construction scenario, and will probably have numerous combinations of these. These typically use instancing since every "unit" is identical except for location. So it would be a bit of a pain to have to create these on the fly, as opposed to bringing in "library" objects.

Thanks.

[sinbad]

Correct, the exporter doesn't support instancing right now. That's because I considered instancing to be a scene exporter function rather than a mesh exporting function, since to re-use the same geometry multiple times without duplication requires a different kind of approach to exporting a single self-contained model. The focus of the existing exporter is to export self-contained meshes & animations, which can be instanced in the scene inside OGRE.

There may be a scene exporter for XSI at some point, it depends what my priorities are over the next 6 months Contributions are welcome if anyone else wants to have a go - but I do believe it's a separate exporting function. One possibility is Collada, the advantage of which is that it is supported by many modellers. Several other tools have dotScene exporters but I haven't had time to make one for XSI yet.

Glad you like the exporter, I'm quite pleased with it

[jemsio]

Fair enough, that makes sense to me.

And yes, I like the exporter a lot (especialy compared to other exporters I've used....).

My positive comments were really about OGRE in general -- I had far less trouble getting to a usable scene and adding my own functionality in OGRE via C++ (which I really am crap at) than via some other game-oriented APIs using Java. It's also a testimonial to the open-source community approach, as the Wiki, tutorials, etc there are far more useful than the developer support sites some commercial API vendors provide (I'm too much of a gentleman to name names....)