3DS Max as leveleditor

[Fillock]

Hi all!

Hope this isn't a stupid question but from the time I played with Torque I learn that Max could only do the eye-candy but not export the level it self. It had something to do with the exported geometry and bad collition-detection.

Do the same aply for Ogre? Or can I use the OgreMax exporter's .mesh in a .scene file as the level for a character to walk on for example?

I have tryed different leveleditor-tools (man I hope they won't be a part of my pipeline) and I tryed to find the "3dssceneexporter" (can't find it and don't know what it supose too do).

Can I use Max as my leveldesign tool, and if so what's the pros and cone?

[hedphelym]

you can do everything in max.
create full levels and so on.

It all depends on how your ogre engine is made to hande what you export.
Ogre is what's showing what you create.

You can also use 3dsmax with for example physx,
then you can do all the physx setup in 3dsmax too (by exporting physx xml files)..

I cannot go in on specifics, but I can say that where I work - our whole workflow is based purely on 3dsmax.
All level creation, characters and so on are made in 3dsmax.

[spacegaier]

From what I heard you can definetely use 3DS Max for that job. An alternative is to have a look at Ogitor.

[syedhs]

You can definitely use 3dsmax.. probably one of the disadvantages is terrain cannot be created easily..

[Jabberwocky]

Agreed with syedhs and spacegaier.

I use ogitor for landscapes, and 3dsmax for indoor levels. I believe OgreMax comes with a sample program and code that loads an exported ogremax .scene file and renders it using Ogre.

[Fillock]

Thanks for the reply

One more thing, if I can do it all i Max, why use Ogitor for landskapes? Max has more adwanced modeling tools when needed... well I see that modeling realtime "in game" can have some benefits, but exept of that?

[Fillock]

Well I guess this answer my question:

http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=59877

[drwbns]

I'm pretty sure there's a few terrain plugins out there for 3dsMax, the only bummer when using it as your level editor is that OgreMax has it's free limitations which I'm not too sure of right now, so placing a lot of materials might be restricted.

[syedhs]

I use ogitor for landscapes, and 3dsmax for indoor levels. I believe OgreMax comes with a sample program and code that loads an exported ogremax .scene file and renders it using Ogre.

Mind telling about how you integrate the Ogitor terrain into your pipeline? What I am trying do is (probably suboptimal) :-
1) Design, sculpting terrain in Ogitor
2) Export it as OBJ -> into 3DSMax. Also export material (simplified one - one big large terrain). The material is mainly used for guidance (so you know which part is grass, dirt, forest etc) as I am not using Ogitor for object placement.
3) In 3dsmax, do the object placement and lightmap.
4) In the actual games, load the osm file (I am using Ofusion) minus the terrain imported. The terrain is loaded straight from Ogitor scene file.

The tricky part is lightmap because 3DSMax will calculate the 2nd texture coordinate for lightmap and I need to remap it into Ogre terrain's - I am not sure about how to do it.