Road blocks to getting started

Entry posted by Foolish · April 25, 2010

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Like many hobbyist developers, I was looking for the biggest bang for the buck. So I experimented with every engine out there that I could find. One of the most common problems I found regardless of the engine is the challenge associated with the content pipeline.

Some engines use proprietary formats like Torque's DTS, or DIF, and others use common, but dreadfully inefficient formats like Microsoft's .x format. Leadwerks uses its .gmf or Game Model Format. And there in was my first obstacle.

My first time around with Leadwerks, I was using Milkshape and Ultimate Unwrap Pro to create GMF files. At the time, I found this pathway to be pretty unreliable. It wasnt' until I started using 3D MAX 2009 with the alternative Leadwerks Exporter that I was able to consistently and reliable export and import into the engine. My success here was really helped by following the YouTube video and using the exporter found here: Arbuz' 2.2 Exporter

and following the youtube tutorial found here: Visual Knights tutorial

I think getting a model into an engine may always require some tweeking, but these resources made it much less cumbersome.

If you are using physics, then the next troublesome area will be creating the .phy file. For complex shapes, the exporter doesn't do too well on its own. In these cases, you need to export the file to an .obj file and then use to the obj2phy utility to create the physics body. Remember that the .phy file needs to be the same name as the gmf file. So for me, I had the following:

tief_tief.gmf (My TIE Fighter gmf file)

tief_tief.phy (the physics file I created by saving my model to .obj and then using the obj2phy utility.

When I use the exporter, I also end up with a set of mat files. Again, following that video tutorial will show you how to do this reliably.

After a few iterations, it becomes second nature to go back into MAX, make some adjustments such as scaling to my model ,and then re-export to GMF.

Good luck.

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Flexman 106

Posted April 26, 2010

Yes, the art pipeline is the monkey on the back for any engine.

The first thing I did was go through lots of old forum posts about materials, shaders, animations, anything on exporting and I cut and pasted snippets into a single document. Complete with screenshots. It took a little compiling but worked as a guidebook and helped learning.

And I found that just using one format, GMF for models and DDS for textures makes organising assets far less messy, no JPGs or BMPs, TGAs.

As for MAX exporting, we have some pretty complicated models. We're having issues using the non-official one, highly detail cockpits and helicopters exported with it kill frame-rates. So we're stuck with using the official one till we know why.

Ultimate Unwrap was pretty good for casual exporting but Dexsoft models would often have shading issues with it. Exports from different exporters are consistently different