Indiegogo campaign for an open model exchange format

[AzP]

Eric Lengyel (and the C4 Engine/Terathon) have launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise money to develop an open model exchange format and export plugins for Maya, 3D Studio Max, and Blender. You can read the details here:
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/open- ... /x/3105524

They've already reached their goals, so perhaps this format could be something that Irrlicht supports? Is another/a newer/a better open model exchange format you guys feel is lacking today?

[CuteAlien]

Sounds at least interesting.

[christianclavet]

This look interesting, but there some questions:

- Format is "open", access to the exporter source is free, but need a licence to create importers or at least access the source.

- This format should support both Vertex animations and bone animations. There is almost no way to export "morphs" as of now. I have not seen any specs info about the capabilities of this new format.

As of now, I would really like that our devs, if they have time to put in file formats, complement more the collada format, by allowing it to load/save animated meshes and scenes (with animated meshes)

We currently have the "irrlicht" format, but it's too limited as of now because you just can't save/load animated meshes, collada suffer the same limitations. Once these format handling will be improved, perhaps think of implementing this new format (a user could even create an implementation that could put into irrEXT). That's the way I see this for now.

[hendu]

While the official C4 importer is limited, the spec is open, and the exporters are open. Writing an importer with those would not be difficult.

But hey, if you need any specific support in a format, design one I made one for a past project, a binary format for simple meshes with fast loading as the number one goal (loaded 7x faster than obj while taking 20% of space).

[Nadro]

@Christian
Why you think that vertex animation will be usefull? Animation base on bones is much better.

[roxaz]

was not collada meant to be model format to serve this purpose? too bad its not catching on, there is a lack of proper collada importers/exporters as i have noticed..

[hendu]

Because Collada is a horrible standard, just like SVG.

[christianclavet]

@Nadro.

Have you seen how difficult is to make a face rig and animating it for creating expressions in characters? Most of the time you will have more bones in the face than on the whole body! For having expressiveness in characters, face animation morphs/vertex animation are much easier and efficient.

Bones are only good in my opinion to make your character move. If you look at most recent game engine (even the Valve source engine is using bones+morphs), their character have an hybrid system that use both bones (moving the character) and morph for expressions.

Still we could only uses bones if we stay in the "zombie" type of game. (dead face)

[Eric Lengyel]

Sorry for posting on an old thread, but I'd like to update you on this project. The new format that we have developed has been named the Open Game Engine Exchange format, and the final specification is available, along with source and binaries for Maya and 3DS Max export plugins, on the official website opengex.org. (We'll be releasing some generic parsing code soon.) We've been seeing a lot of interest in this format from developers ranging from indies to major studios, and it has already solved all of the art import pipeline problems that we were previously experiencing with Collada. It even supports morphs.

[Nadro]

Thanks for this great info. This format looks really nice and I hope that it'll be available in Irrlicht as soon as possible.

[CuteAlien]

I searched a little and that here seems to be the link to the official side: http://opengex.org/

On first view it looks like a mix of model and sceneformat. Unfortunately no example models yet and the Blender plugin is not yet available, so I guess we have to wait until we see first examples. Though maybe we still have someone here using Maya or Max3D who can generate a few example models.

Adding to Irrlicht... will probably take a little unless we use the same messy trick as for Collada and implement a sceneloader as hack in the meshloader (the reason there was likely to avoid code-duplication which in itself is a good thing). We should work on a sceneloader interface. Having one more scene-format might be a good time for that.

[kklouzal]

I use 3Ds Max, if there is an importer I can export some of my already created models, otherwise I can make some fresh ones with a few bones and animations then export them in this format! I would love to help support Irrlicht in any way I can! :)