Volition FBX to Game Converter - WIP

Meatplowz

Meatplowz

A little bit of an update.
I've been able to wrangle various programmers to help in my efforts lately and I have made some additional progress after being blocked. Nothing fancy here, but this screen shot of two triangles is the first processed fbx file to character mesh and rig working in game. I felt getting to this stage was going to be the toughest part for me and everything after should be much easier. Let's hope that is the case. I just thought I would share my tiny victory. I'll try to keep you updated and I hope to have more to show soon.

I realized this may not be the best location for this thread.
Mods, if you would like to relocate this feel free.

upload_2013-12-18_18-50-31.png
 
I think it's important enough to be under announcements. :)
 
Another big update here. I believe I have the fbx -> cmeshx or character mesh in a pretty good state. Currently, it only supports the first UV MapChannel so there is still a bit of work to go to get more MapChannel support and VIDs. The broken uv vert's and vert duplication conversion to our format was a bit of a task for me to wrangle but I do believe I got it.

As you can see here in this image, the heavypistol_a weapon here is directly from an Fbx file exported from 3dsmax.

upload_2013-12-27_23-50-49.png


Things on my ToDo list:
Multiple UVMapChannels support
Shader Assignment
- The materials that are written out from FBX don't have the shader references we use in game. At the moment I am stubbing in a dumy material for each material ID.
- I may go with a user-assigned shader in the User Interface that should plug in the proper bitmaps from the FBX material.
Proper Material Output
- I have to come up with a more sophisticated way to write the custom material blocks after the specific manual shader assignment
Vids ( Submeshes for hiding faces ) - may come later for characters specifically
User Interface for the tool
- User will import the FBX > It will be evaluated and allow the end users to assign the proper shaders to specific material ids and output cmesh_pc, rig_pc, matlib_pc, etc.

That's it for now. Hopefully more progress will be made here shortly.
 
Would've been great if these tools could export the game-shaders themselves but no worries, if we're left with the only option of workaround, we could live with it. The fact alone that the engine was able to identify and accept the Max exported texture is a great achievement in itself. Wish you all the best.
 
Another small update.
I wanted to get the UI up so I could determine how to best assign the shader references for the materials. I also had to spend some time re-factoring the code for the import/conversion process now that a UI is the go between. Proper material conversion is next.

upload_2013-12-30_23-57-53.png
 
Dhruv said:
Would've been great if these tools could export the game-shaders themselves but no worries, if we're left with the only option of workaround, we could live with it. The fact alone that the engine was able to identify and accept the Max exported texture is a great achievement in itself. Wish you all the best.
Click to expand...
The artists didn't actually create the game shaders in the past projects. They worked with programmers or tech artists to get the shaders they wanted. We had another custom tool the programmers or tech artists would build the shaders that would output the game HLSL shader and a scripted 3dsmax plugin version to somewhat represent what they would see in game. For now referencing the shaders that exist in game in your custom materials is the easiest process to get working at the moment. Hopefully that will work for some time.
 
[V] Meatplowz said:
The artists didn't actually create the game shaders in the past projects. They worked with programmers or tech artists to get the shaders they wanted. We had another custom tool the programmers or tech artists would build the shaders that would output the game HLSL shader and a scripted 3dsmax plugin version to somewhat represent what they would see in game. For now referencing the shaders that exist in game in your custom materials is the easiest process to get working at the moment. Hopefully that will work for some time.
Click to expand...
I was under the impression that there would be a shader library present somewhere in the game files and while modding, we could use the tool to assign the shaders accordingly and the game engine would just read and identify them from there. And yeah, thats what I'm talking about- "referencing the shaders that exist in game". Probably I couldn't make myself clear in the previous post.
The UI looks pretty impressive and user-friendly enough. Great job on that.
 
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