MAYA 4.0 : A L I A S | WaveFront
Occasionally I dabble with some development, this time my motivation has been my recent unsuccessful job application for a Game Development Position.
First of, Maya can seem very deceptive at first glance. It takes a lot of ram to start up, the UI is fairly well populated and you get the all the default features you'd expect. So, nothing fancy you might think, sure there are other 3D packages that can do all that.
Here are a few points to consider.
Maya has become the most popular package in a number of industries, and has made its mark through great achievements some of which include Final Fantasy Film, Bugs Life, Grand Turismo 3 for playstation2 and countless other productions.
Over all, Maya is nothing short of being dubbed the most powerful and fascinating 3D authoring software out there that's available to the general consumer who can afford in excess of 30k.
My pet project focus for the moment has been on how to apply Maya as a game development tool, this has turned out to be a very easy task as Maya supports an excess of modeling features designed to be directly advantageous to the game level designer and game engine developer, features such as polygon reduction, per vertex editing, UV mapping, multi-texturing, lighting, extruding, just to list a few. So we have the 3D scene covered, however this is not very useful if the saved data is particularly tricky to post-process, which I must admit, reading native Maya ASCII or binary files can be a monumental task. This is easily over come as Maya comes with a number of standard plug-ins that allow the exporting of scenes in various popular file formats such as RTG, GE2, VRML2, OBJ, DXF, IGE , RIB and others unknown to me.
The answer for a game developer will lie in utilizing an export plug-in, lets cut to the chase, the contenders are VRML2, OBJ, RTG, GE2. All offer the main part of the solution, and all of these export verts UV normals textures lights more or less, OBJ being the least complicated and least useful format.
GE2 VRML2 and RTG all are viable options, my conclusion has been GE2 ( Game Exchange File Format). Reason being is VRML is too specialized , RTG although having written a loader for it and having it work fairly well I am not happy with the complexity and unexpectedness of its structure. GE2 is probably an obvious choice , with a more coherent structure split among several files.
Here are some links to the partly finished scene loaders, this page has been a rush rush cut corners type of thing done in 20minutes so please forgive the rough edges:
RTG RTGLoader.zip This is a reasonably well functioning loader, ready to go as an object freshly cut and pasted from my project. If you have any problems with missing stuff or not working stuff or any comments let me know [email protected]
RTG DOC: RtgFileFormat.htm RTG file structure.
GE2 Ge2Loader.zip This will be here soon, the link is just an incomplete start, working on it right now, progress is not far but the technical difficulty is low and it should be up and running within the near future. Note: you don't have to download this it wont do anything for ya ok?
UPDATE : Monday, 12. November 2001 10:02 PM +0800
Working version of GE2 Loader.. Whole Ge2Loader project with sample GE2 scene included. Have fun :)
GE2 DOC: GE2Docs.zip Game exchange file structure documentation as Pdf.