Exporting all meshes in a scene w/out positions/transforms?

[jfaust]

Exporting with 3d studio btw, but it wouldn't fit in the title.

I'm working on a project where we need to have a 1 to 1 relationship between the physical model (which is loaded into Novodex) and the graphical one (loaded into Ogre obviously). For example, we have a model of the Pioneer 3 robot (http://www.activrobots.com/ROBOTS/p2dx.html), and each piece (2 drive wheels, body, caster wheel) needs to be a separate entity. This is fine, I have it working with just .pml and .mesh files (pml for the scene and physics data...thinking about moving this to dotScene + pml + meshes, but right now it's easier to focus on just the pml and meshes).

The problem comes when designing things with more pieces, and "large" environments. Currently we have to export each piece separately, positioned at (0,0,0) and with no rotation for the .mesh, then put it in a scene and export the pml. I'd like to be able to just create a scene and export the .meshes in it automatically. In the Octopus exporter, if I hit "export all", each mesh is exported (it seems) with its vertices relative to where it is in the scene, not relative to the object's local space. Since the mesh node's position/orientation simply get set to the Novodex Actor's position/orientation, this is a problem. Is there any way around this, or some solution I'm just not seeing? Or is the easiest thing to modify the exporter to automatically undo the transforms before exporting them?

Also, if there's some better solution to what I'm trying to do, please point it out to me. COLLADA seems like it would be ideal, but from what I can tell it's not very mature.

Edit: Hmm, I just found the COLLADA roadmap, and the 1.4 release may solve all my problems on Nov. 4th. *crosses fingers*.