Easy Ogre Exporter for 3DSMAX

[arkeon]

0.8 released !

the exporter now manage material conversion from Architecture materials and MentalRay Archi / Design materials

[JDX_John]

Hi, I just noticed this new exporter - we currently use OgreMax mainly.

Can you summarize what this plugin offers which OgreMax doesn't, or the differences, or why people might prefer your plugin? It'd be really helpful!

[arkeon]

Hello !

all actual supported features are explain here : http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/Easy+Ogre+Exporter

What the main difference with other exporter ?
I think that this is the fact Easy Ogre Exporter don't try to kill a fly with a bazooka
It mainly manage standard Max features like standard materials, Mental ray Arch / Design materials
And the Motion Mixer to separate animations
You just need in most cases to click in the "Export" menu to get your Ogre scene.

Sure if you want more advanced features and manage materials with special tweaks you should better use OgreMax, but if you just want to export a max scene as it to Ogre, Easy Ogre Exporter should be quicker.

[Nodrev]

Another big difference is the lack of "Ogre Viewport" as in OgreMax, but in fact that's not a worry, because Arkeon manages to get an Ogre material conversion close as possible as the 3DSMax rendering (and so, we do not really need it, as in OgreMax, it presence is mainly to check that OgreMaxMaterial are configured as the artist want, automatic conversion leave this problem of). This exporter was originally developed as artists we works with loose a lot of time to re-configure every material to OgreMaxMaterial format on their existing scenes.
Just one little remark, Arkeon spent a lot of his (personal) time on this exporter, so please give him feedback on it, it will help him to make it better

[arkeon]

Thanks Nodrev ^^

I also forgot to mention that Easy Ogre Exporter is free and opensource (LGPL)
So you can modify the sources to make a custom version for your projects.

[JDX_John]

Thanks... I will try (well ask my artist to try) it sometime.

[shanefarris]

To split the track you have to use the motion mixer :
- first select your animated object
- Animation menu -> save animation and choose the animation interval (from 0 to 20 for example)
- graph menu -> motion mixer
- add a track for each animated object
- add a clip from each file

so the motion mixer clips will be exported as single animations with the clip name

I have finally figured out how to export animations using the mixer, but when I do the bones are messed up just like before. Could there be something I am doing wrong with this process?

[arkeon]

Hmm strange...

Anyway the bones matrix should be ok.. maybe again a strange case in max ...
Did you try with the current version of Easy Ogre Exporter ? I made some corrections on bone translation maybe this could change something with your model
try to download the exporter again

I've posted the question to do this the right way on autodesk forum but there is no responses :/
http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk ... anslation/

[arkeon]

Maybe an another idea, when you import a clip in the mixer there is an option "relative" or "global", try the "global" option when you add your clips

[arkeon]

New version of the Easy Ogre Exporter : v0.9

This release add an automatic shader generation for pixel lighting and normal / specular maps
It generate a cg and program file depending of the materials.

Tell me if you find mistakes in the shaders ^^

[EricB]

I was wondering if it would be possible to get this plugin to work in 3dsm 8?

[DragonM]

One minor bug. If the scene name contains a space and is used as the prefix and filenames for shader files, the shaders fail to load. I'm not sure if Ogre supports spaces in the source line of a vertex_program or fragment_program. If it does, they apparently need to be quoted. A program specification that looks like this doesn't work:

Code: Select all

vertex_program vsAmbGEN cg
{
	source check 1.cg
	profiles vs_1_1 arbvp1
	entry_point vsAmbGEN
	default_params
	{
		param_named_auto wvpMat worldviewproj_matrix
	}
}

[arkeon]

You're right, I managed name conversion for materials names but I forgot this case.
I'll correct that, thanks

@bronzebeard
This version is really still used ?
sorry but the API breaks from max8 to max9 are too huges

[arkeon]

Version 0.95 is available

the material prefix is now a resource prefix for materials, mesh, textures and programs
the last configuration is stored
and spaces or bad char are replaced by _ in resources names

[DragonM]

Feature requests from my artist:

It would be helpful if the exporter could detect vertices that have more than 4 bone weights and warn. It would be most helpful if the offending vertices were selected or otherwise marked by the exporter so they can be easily located and corrected.

It would also be helpful if you could choose not to export bones that aren't used for weights on any vertices at all. The Max biped has numerous bones that aren't used for weights but are used for convenience.

We're very pleased with EOE so far. Kudos granted and I'd grant more if I could.

[arkeon]

hmm I think that a max script could provide this functionality to show the vertices to correct.

I already spent a lot of time on the bones conversion and I still have no response from the Area forum for bones matrix conversions on translation :/
I'll try to have a look at this when I'll have time, but don't promise i'll found how to do that ^^

thanks for the kudos

[JDX_John]

I've asked our artist to play with EOE a little on some of our scenes currently exported with OgreMax. I'll report more in a bit but one one of our large scenes I'm told the export crashed, are you aware of any crash bugs?

In terms of feature requests, would you consider adding spline-export? OgreMax exports splines as simple meshes consisting of lines between spline points; another option might be to simply export a parent SceneNode for a spline with each point as a child node named like sp0,sp1,sp2,etc. Not sure if many others use splines but it's very useful to us.

[arkeon]

Thanks for the report !

The only crash I found is on ogre build edgelist and lod when there is not welded closes vertices
The export logs could help to find more infos about the crash and maybe isolate the object concerned to help correct this

Yes splines can be usefull I'll try to work on this.

[JDX_John]

Personally I'd probably prefer not to export a spline as a renderable object like a mesh, since we'd normally want to build a spline from the control-points and render by interpolating points along the Ogre spline. But I don't know what you think is best?

[Dario ff]

Hello and thanks arkeon a lot for this great exporter. I'm having a couple of issues with the scene files written tho.

1) The scene XML exported uses the european version of decimals using commas as separators. That means that I have to hotfix or change the locale of my program for reading it specifically. Could you provide the option to write them out in the standard . decimal version instead?

2) I'm having some weird issues with object scaling. For example in this file I'm testing, Max says the absolute scale for the object is 1,221. When I write out the scene file and meshes, it writes out as 0,012207(or 0,01221 due to rounding if you want). It shows up way too small inside the application, but if I use scale (1,1,1) or the scale I mentioned multiplied by 100(so it's 1,211 again) it shows up BIGGER than the original max file. I had to multiply the scale vector from the exported scene file by 25 to get it to look accurate. I need these coordinates to be accurate, so what might be the issue behind this? (The automatic flipping and transformation between the Z and Y axis, is really appreciated tho, thanks for doing it properly )

[arkeon]

Hello !

the project is now added on our Redmine
you can add the issues or requested features here:
http://redmine.scolring.org/projects/eoe/issues

it will be more easy to follow

[Dario ff]

http://redmine.scolring.org/projects/eoe/issues
it will be more easy to follow

I tried creating an account but I haven't received any activation e-mails. You think you could submit the issue for me? : )

I'd look into downloading the source and see if I can correct it myself as well if it doesn't need too much stuff to compile.

EDIT: Ignore that, it seems it got caught in the spam folder. Submitted both issues.

[arkeon]

Thanks I'll have a look on it ASAP (I need some rest right now )

[thebluefish]

I really like this exporter and I use it for my static objects with great success. However the motion mixer is really too broken for me to animate with (I just lost several hours worth of work because of the horridly broken way max handles these). Perhaps let us define frame ranges and names instead for our animations would make it much simpler to work with

[arkeon]

What do you think about to use the Time tags ?
someone talk to me about it and it seems to be a good solution (if I found how to get this infos in the sdk)