3DS Max 2010 support for VTF and SMD plug-ins.Mon, May 4th, 2009 @ 23:57
I’ve now re-compiled my 3DS Max plug-ins to support 3DS Max 2010. Grab them while they’re hot! :)
The only change has been to the SMD exporter where I’ve added support for spline objects after user requests. I left it out on purpose to stop people using splines in place of bones or dummies in model skeletons. The reason being is that they are very quirky and it often results in the animation in Max not matching the rotation on export. They are fine to use to as controllers to influence the rotation of a bone or dummy but don’t use them as bones themselves. You’ll put yourself in a world of pain.
I’ve testing the plug-ins in the 32-bit version of 3DS Max 2010 but I’m assuming that they’ll work fine in the 64-bit version too.
As always, any problems let me know.
Tales of Ham, Jam, SMD importers, Max and more…Mon, May 19th, 2008 @ 00:35
Been a while since I made any posts about what I’m up to these days so I thought it was about time I did. Not that I made many before but anyway…
In what little free time I’ve had over the past three months I’ve been hitting the Ham and Jam code pretty hard, doing what feels like a huge amount of coding to try and nail all the bugs we found in our last play test. There’s still some small niggles but if the hlcoders mailing list is to be believed, their inherent SDK bugs and hard to fix and not likely to go away.
Anyway, of the new thing to add was the deploy system for weapons with a bi-pod which, after two false starts, actually works now. The process of doing the deployment and swapping animations wasn’t too hard – it’s just all the other crap you have to deal with like the logic to check if you should be allowed to deploy and limiting player movement, preventing weapon selection, etc.
Still, apart from the art asset side of things, game play wise Ham and Jam is really starting to come together and resemble a proper game now.
I’ve been working quite a bit with 3DS Max plug-ins over the past week too and finally found a couple of hours to do some more work on the SMD importer I’m writing for Max 9, 2008 and 2009. I made a bit of a breakthrough today in that I made the first successful test run of the mesh re-construction code and apart from a small few snags at first, it actually works!
This may not seem like a big deal, but when you consider how an SMD file stores data it’s actually pretty cool. SMD files store each polygon in your model as a separate un-joined triangle. The problem with importing data like that is you get a huge number of duplicate vertices and your polygons aren’t actually connected together. As a result, you can’t smooth them out or set the normals properly as anyone who’s tried to use the MaxScript importer will know. The code I wrote analyses the data coming in from the SMD and uses some logic to reconstruct the mesh as one continuous mesh rather than separate triangles.
Lastly, you’ll probably of noticed over the last month or so I updated all my VTF tools to support the 7.4 texture version which started shipping with the Orange Box games. It took a while to do, mainly due to VTFLib which they rely on being a bit out of date. Nem usually handles the releases and while the code was there, he’d got really busy and didn’t have a chance to get it out as quickly as usual. Still, not biggy, it’s done now so hopefully everything should handle EP2/TF2 textures just fine now.
That’s all for now. Back to work…
New version of the SMD exporter with Max 2009 support!Sat, May 17th, 2008 @ 20:14
I made a small update to my SMD exporter plug-in to fix a bug in the batch mode that a user reported. While I was at it I used it as an opportunity to tidy a few bits of code up and port it to Max 2009 at the same time.
I’ve tested it with the 64-bit version of Max 2009 under Vista so I’m assuming it works under 32-bit fine. Naturally let me know if there’s are any problems.
- 3DS Max SMD exporter version 1.2
Oops my bad – VTF Extensions fix.Fri, April 25th, 2008 @ 17:58
Seems a small bug slipped through the net with the VTF Shell Extensions which was causing problems with VTF textures generated without MIP maps. I’ve made and update so you can download and update to the latest version to fix it.
In short, images without MIP maps were showing strange, interlaced looking thumbnails. There was also an issue with really big non-MIP images crashing explorer. This was due to the large ammounts of memory needed to generate thumbnails from the fullsize image rather than a MIP level. As a get-around for now the extension won’t attempt to generate thumbnails for non-MIPmapped images greater than 512×512 pixels.
- Windows VTF Shell Extensions version 1.0.6.1
3DS Max VTF plug-in update.Mon, April 14th, 2008 @ 21:30
Following on from yesterdays update of the VTF Shell extensions, I’ve now update my 3DS Max VTF plug-ins. These now support 7.3 and 7.4 VTF formats and I’ve included a 64-bit build. The Max 9 version should work in 3DS Max 2008 as well.
- 3DS Max VTF import plug-in version 1.3
