Question Common 3D formats of add-on makers?

[Artlav]

What are the most used mesh/model making programs among Orbiter add-on developers?
Which file formats are most often imported into Orbiter msh?
Which format would you like to be easily imported to msh?

Share your preferences please.

 

[Urwumpe]

3ds and obj. An8 would be nice, but I see it as impossible to do right, as one Anim8or file can contain many objects.

Is there a native blender format? Then adding that as well would be nice.

 

[Kaito]

me PERSONALLY would like to see a .xsi file importer, plus possibly a way to use XSI Mod Tool to directly import animations

 

[Zatnikitelman]

Heilor and I use Wings3d (or at least he knows a lot about it ), but it can already export to a lot of formats plus a plugin for .msh format so I don't know how much making another way for it to export to Orbiter would save anyone any time.

 

[Woo482]

.obj and .3ds are probably the most used ones

 

[Kaito]

Another thing I would like to see are textures in .bmp, .jpg, .jpeg, some more common texture then .dds
I know there's a utility to convert images to .dds, but i think it would just be easier to make them .bmp or whatever

 

[Schimz]

Lightwave3D. He use metric units and same coordinates system as orbiter : WYSIWYG.

 

[Hielor]

Another thing I would like to see are textures in .bmp, .jpg, .jpeg, some more common texture then .dds
I know there's a utility to convert images to .dds, but i think it would just be easier to make them .bmp or whatever

Jpeg is a very lossy format, and I believe that it doesn't have transparency. Plus, using .dds means that it loads faster, since the texture is already in the format that the renderer needs. It only takes a couple minutes to convert all of the textures for your addon into .dds.

 

[Arthur Dent]

I use AC3D with it's native .ac format. There is already an export plugin for the Orbiter .msh format.

 

[unussapiens]

The blender format (.blend) is a very complex format, designed for scenes, animation secquences and pretty much anything else you might need to make 3D movie. Having said that, if anyone is up to the challenge I would love to be able to use .blend files in Orbiter.

I also support the idea of having other texture formats. png is my personal favourite.

 

[Tschachim]

I'm using the free gmax software (http://www.turbosquid.com/gmax) together with Mindblast's max2msh converter (http://www.nestadlinn.de/orbiter/). As far as I know gmax and the commercial 3ds Max (http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=5659302) are using the same .max file format.

Cheers
Tschachim

 

[FordPrefect]

Similar to Tschachim here. I believe DaveS uses GMAX too.

It doesn't look easy to determine the most commonly used 3D app among our developers.

 

[DaveS]

Similar to Tschachim here. I believe DaveS uses GMAX too.

Yep. GMAX here, since 2006. Although I believe the 3DSMAX .max and GMAX .gmax formats are different.

 

[Istochnikov]

Yep, they're different and incompatible. 3DStudio has the problem that the models should be scaled down to a ~46% for using them in orbiter.

 

[h_m_murdochuk]

The blender format (.blend) is a very complex format, designed for scenes, animation secquences and pretty much anything else you might need to make 3D movie. Having said that, if anyone is up to the challenge I would love to be able to use .blend files in Orbiter.

There is a .blend exporter for orbiter available here http://sourceforge.net/projects/blorbiter

Edit: Having said that I can't get it working at the moment with the latest blender version and Vista - may just be because my brain's fried tonight!

 

[ar81]

Trispectives. Upon exporting to WRL format it creates a mesh without texturing.