It seems as winter draws nearer my freetime gets less and less so a lot of my projects have been pushed onto the back-burner for now. Work and family comes first, sleeping second and Ham and Jam third as I just want to see it done.

Luckily this weekend was quiet so I took some time to do some more work on the 3DS Max SMD Importer plug-in and got the vertex weighting code fleshed out so now the meshes is actually linked to the bones. Now that step is done, the importer actually becomes useful and I can think about making an initial release at least as an alpha version for testing.

Up until now the code has mostly been mostly prototyping so I’ve spent the weekend refining it and adding in error handling as I’m sure in the real world there will be the odd screwed up SMD file it’ll have to deal with. I need to put a nice options dialog and a few other bits and pieces as well before it’s really usable.

So here’s a recap of what you can/can’t do with the importer right now.

Imported TF2 Heavy

TF2 Heavy in 3DS Max 9. Model on the right is posed slightly to show the skin modifier working.

It imports the SMD as a single continuous mesh so you don’t need to weld anything back together (like with the MaxScript importer). It doesn’t yet re-build smoothing groups but you can fix this yourself by just adding an Edit Poly modifier on top and using AutoSmooth or do it manually. Materials and UV’s are imported and assigned to a Multi/Sub material type.

Bones are imported and posed in the reference pose but it doesn’t yet handle importing animations. That shouldn’t be hard to do, I just haven’t got around to it yet. Vertex weights are imported and the mesh attached to the skeleton via a Skin modifier.

There still a long way to go and I’ve a lot of useful idea’s for features for the importer but for now, I’ll just be happy to get something out the door people can use 😀

Feel free to ask any questions.