What I Did Today

[Atrocities]

I decided to see if I could export my DOGA ship sets into a format that I can load into another 3d modeling program. I have a freind over at an art school who has acess to 3d Studio max, not that either one of us knows how to use it.

I exported several ship models, who's average Polygon count is around 10,000, burned them to disk and headed out the door.

I discovered a few days ago that I cannot import any of my ship models into Blender, or Maya. So those programs are out.

I drive all the way into Portland and meet with her. She fires up 3dmax and well it took a while. After it was up and running, we tried to import one of the files I brought. It would only recognize one, DXF. (Turns out it is an auto Cad file.)

Well it did not take. It came back with errors and would not load the file.

Since DOGA can only export to DXF, VRML(*.WRL), and Direct3d, I found myself feeling very sick.

None of the file formats would upload to 3dmax.

Maya will not import any of them either. Well it will, but not well, and it does not export to X format which is what I have been told SEV will be using.

We know that we must have a polygon count of no more than 1500 in order for a model to work well in SEV based on SF.

While we messed around I took a moment to play with the tutorials for 3dmax and well, OMG what a monster. I mean the learning curve on this program is like horrendous.

I really wish I had the money to take classes on the program so that I could learn how to use it. Right now I am stuck with a my DOGA files, that can export to X format, but have too high of a polygon count for use with SE V.

I have a slim hope of being able to find a way to lower the polygon counts of these models, but how to do that, I do not know.

[Phoenix-D]

AT, send me a few of your models in DOGA format, and say what Version you used to make them. I KNOW I got a DOGA model into Bryce once and if I can get it into Bryce I can get it into almost anything.

[email protected]

[Aiken]

AT, I suggest you to make better - put several of your obsolete models availiable for public (in all formats you can do). We can arrange some kind of brainstorming against this problem, trying to open it in different modellers, using some tricks to lower poly count, etc.

[David E. Gervais]

AT, Around here there are Universities that offer a 'professional' course on 3DS Max, It is a intensive 'night-time' course that runs 20 weeks with two classes a week. Each class is about 3 hours. The course costs $12,000. I have a few friends that took the course and in the end they said that the teacher only knew the basics but encouraged the students to explore the 'other' aspects of the program. omg, my friend felt so ripped off, not only that, there wire 17 students in the same class.. and only one teacher. And to make things worse, the teacher was virtually unreachable out of class hours and during the class every student was trying to squeeze as much 1-on-1 time with the teacher as they could. ( I did a quick count, $204,000 taken in student fees for the course and the total number of hours the teacher worked with the students was/is 120. That works out to $1700/Hour that the teacher\course organizers made/make.) I'll say it again.. o..m..g.. what a ripoff. Oh and you want to know the killer fact? Only 3 of the 17 students actually went on to get jobs that use 3DS Max.

Anyway, there are many less expensive tools out there, and most if not all are easier to learn.

BTW the idea of sharing/posting a few of your models (with the higher poly counts) is a good one. It would give people that are interested some examples to play with and try to reduce the poly count.

Note, the people at http://www.thegamecreators.com/
have some 3D Modelers and a poly crunching program that looks pretty good. It might be worth thrying their demo's

That's all I have to say for now, Cheers!

[Ed Kolis]

Supposedly the DirectX SDK includes functions to simplify a mesh in 5 lines of C# code:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...plifyamesh.asp

I could probably whip up a quick program to simplify your DoGA models for you... the only problem would be that the REASON that DoGA's models are so triangle-intensive is that they have many useless triangles, i.e. triangles in one Lego part that are inside another Lego part. I doubt DirectX can take care of those automatically, but it can at least reduce the polygon count of your models... at a significant loss in quality, of course...

What you REALLY need is a modeller with CSG - that's Constructive Solid Geometry - on triangle meshes. That will take care of getting rid of those useless interior trangles.
How about Silo? It's not free like Wings (it's $109, which is still pretty cheap for what you get), but it has a similar interface to Wings, and it supports CSG as well as a couple other handy features which Wings lacks. Think of it as Wings on steroids There's also a free Version, but that limits you to 100 polygons, which doesn't even cover the default sphere, so that's probably out of the question. You can check out a 17-day demo at www.nevercenter.com... hmm, I think I just might bring up Silo if anyone still needs Christmas gift ideas for me

The only real complaint I have about Silo is the lack of options for texture mapping, but there are dedicated programs like LithUnwrap which can take care of that

[Aiken]

Atrocities said:
I exported several ship models, who's average Polygon count is around 10,000, burned them to disk and headed out the door.

I discovered a few days ago that I cannot import any of my ship models into Blender, or Maya. So those programs are out.

Very strange.
You can export your model as a 3DFACE DXF file (or POLYLINE DXF, but first one works better). Then fire up Blender and import this DXF (File->Import->DXF...)
It works fine. And btw Blender can export to .X format (at least to dx8).
See this screenshot and this screenshot

[Atrocities]

Well I cannot get it to work at all. I gave up on it.

[Hugh Manatee]

I've gotten DXF files out of Doga into Amapi, Blender, and others, Try Crossroads3d:

EDIT, The crossroads 3D site is down.... google for it maybe. If I can find it I'll send it to you, it was a freeware.

Amapi: http://www.amapi.net/amapi.php?va1=ZG93bmxvYWRz

[Aiken]

Does it look as intended?
[cleanup]
Make sure you have latest Version of Blender installed (2.36). Also you might need to instal Python 2.34 (python.org)

[Atrocities]

That does not look right. Nope, not right at all.
Will install latest Version again.