Which 3D App Gives You What You See...

... or at least comes the closest to giving you what you see in your modeller?

i've been going over the docs from a few apps, and it looks as if 3DSMAX and Maya look like they come closest... what about Truespace and Milkshape, how do they fair...

also, does the 3D development environment have to have a plugin of sorts to facilitate this... and if so, where does that leave Blitz3D?

--Mike

...what? What do you mean by "gives you what you see"?

I assumed he must be talking about from the point of view of the render - which modeller outputs a textured geometry that is as closer to a render. I'd assume that all relates to the quality of the textures.

sorry... that was a lil vague...

what i mean is, as far as the texture and materials that the object exhibits in the modeller...

specularity, diffuse texture, bump texture rtc...

--Mike

That doesn't really help. What render? Anyway, it is logically impossible for raw geometry output to resemble a render, since you don't actually see anything until it is rendered. Asking what geometry looks most like a render is sort of like asking what rock looks the most like a drawing of a rock.

ADDITION: My response was to puki. Responding to red's clarification, that all varies by the development tool you're using. In general you're going to have the most compatibility with 3D Studio Max, simply because people write plugins for that the most, but it's not a cast-in-stone rule.

Besides, not all 3D apps support all those features. The rendering in Blitz of a Milkshape model will look just like the model did in Milkshape for the simple reason that Milkshape doesn't support any material settings other than diffuse texture.

so, in other words, there has to be some sort of material info exported by the modeller that the development environment can read in when it loads the mesh, and then have it applied to it... do i have that right?

like in the TV3D materials ed... or in that Beyond Virtual development thing, which works closely with Maya... ???


--Mike

All I can see are full stops!

My post was based on the fact that he was rendering the scene first. Which is a fair guess based on his first post.

Actually 3dsmax does a pretty good job, it works with up to shader 3 and lets you use your regular material editor you would use for pre rendered stuff to create very similar shader materials, so long as your using DX9.

A ok streaming vid demonstrating DX shader creation and viewing in max.

http://download.autodesk.com/media/3dsmax/directx_max8_350k.wmv

Yup. I'm glad you figured that out so quickly, since your initial post sounded to me like you were badly misguided on this issue.

In terms of Blitz specifically, the way Blitz handles various materials thing like multitexturing and the way that stuff in handled in 3D Studio Max is different so you can't really carry it over directly. Rather, you'd be setting up how you want it to look, and then recreating the look later. It's not as bad as it sounds though, especially with tools like B3D Tweak and halo's b3d materials thingy to help.

thx guys... i'm glad you two were browsing the forum at the right time...

jH... misguided and confused am i :)

Evak... i'm viewing the video now... so that's why the darn thing costs so much... at least, that's one of the reasons why :)

thx again guys...

--Mike

XSI, and maybe others, has a feature where you can plug-in your game engine to use directly in the 3D viewport. So what you see in XSI is exactly what it will look like in your game. Though I'm guessing this won't work at all with Blitz3D, as you can't (as far as I know) easily plug Blitz3D into XSI. So it's kind of useless for us.

Or to quote their website. "Using the integrated, programmable display pipeline and realtime shaders in XSI allows developers to author and import game shaders directly in XSI, where artists can validate them on characters and props in any viewport."

Ragnar

3DSMAX is my option...what you see is what you get..

@ragtag, yeah thats what we have with aurora, we have the game engine running within the max viewport, so that everything is WYSIWYG in the engine, materials, lighting, shadows. shaders etc. When you load your scene into Aurora through the scene loader library it comes out exactly the same as in 3dsmax.

The pro version of the scene loader comes with a scripting language you can use from within 3dsmax, complete with editor that combines the best of wysiwyg in max, plus a seperate IDE tool with preview for coders that don't have max. so you can set up your levels, triggers and what have you and control those in realtime in max viewports too.

It comes with a loader lib much like the scene loader, just a script loader using a C++ style syntax that is designed to easily compile with minor changes.

for the more advanced features you need to get the pro version, that also translates the max to FX shader tools into ogre materials without having to go through all the weird coding steps you currently do in the free one.

Ant wants to use LUA at the moment, naturaly, I'm really interested in the max friendly scriping tools which will let you embed scripts within your levels and objects, like particle spawning sequences for multiple triggered explosion sequences, and quick swapping of destructable states in desxtructible scenery meshes.

Here's a work in progress with a viewport rendered in Ogre. Looks a lot better driving through it with animated shadows being cast over you and the scenery by moving machinery :(

if you use b3d pipeline for 3dsmax its has a model previewer.

thx for the insights and the screenies E...

--Mike