CGTalk - How can I use M:A for gamecontent?

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Bertoluci

11-29-2003, 11:46 AM

Hello,

I`m new to this forum. I`m happy about the support of this forum. I own m:a for one year now but I was lost without some good tutorials. And now, there is this forum. Great ;)

After one year of working in other 2D-Design and conception, I test some 3D-Apps for the devellopment of a computergame. Some friends and me we want to build our first little game. I have a Lightwave-background. Now I need a tool to create render-animations and in game animations (.x) with support of all the actual features (UV, normalmapping, skin or bonedeform ...).

I tested softimage xsi before, the tools are impressive (maybe a way too different from my LW-bg but verry impressive), but the price is heavy. It seems, softimage has it all (rendergrafic and gamegrafic + normalmapping, gameexporter).

Max has it all, but its hard for me to get lucky with this tool.

LW has a good renderer, but I think, good characteranimation can only be done with the help of an extern tool like messiah and LWs exporters are sh... .

And then is there the motionbuilder, but it is another new program to learn and I have to setup all my bones in LW (oh no!)

I love messiah. I was impressed as I saw the messiah videos on www.projectmessiah.com. The autocharacterrig is verry impressive and easy. After downloading the demo I was able to setup a characterrig in 15 minutes! I read about all the new features (walkdesigner!).
But there is one question left; Is messiah able to export in game animations in the future (mesh deformation and bonesystems)? I think, today it is not implemented. If messiah can do the job, I could do all the renderings in LW and could export the realtimecontent from messiah.

Thank you
Bertoluci

chikega

11-30-2003, 02:37 PM

Originally posted by Bertoluci
But there is one question left; Is messiah able to export in game animations in the future (mesh deformation and bonesystems)? I think, today it is not implemented. If messiah can do the job, I could do all the renderings in LW and could export the realtimecontent from messiah.
Thank you
Bertoluci

Welcome to the list, Bertoluci!

I believe, at this time, messiah does not export hierarchical information (bones) only mesh deformation. "maks" may be someone to talk to about this since he works for a gaming company and uses messiah - check out this thread:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=102971

:)

Julez4001

11-30-2003, 04:26 PM

Yep. Lyle said they are working on a directx export, llike FBX, it may be a license issue. Which is "money out" for a small company.

DaveW

12-01-2003, 07:10 AM

I'm pretty sure someone here said they animate in messiah and export the motion as bvh, and then load those onto Character Studio bipeds for weighting and game export. If that's too costly, you could try the super cheap route of using Milkshape to do the bvh->dx8 conversion. I don't know how good the point weighting in Milkshape is though, it might be kind of a pain. Perhaps your programmer can see if it's possible to make a plugin to import a messiah weight file into Milkshape.

BTW, what problems are you having with the LW DX exporter? It's been a couple years since I used it but it worked.

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