Unity Game Engine

[gschumsky]

Anyone seen this yet? Looks pretty cool, and can take .3ds files. Question: Is there a way to get Hash models into .fbx?

 

http://otee.dk

 

 

Greg

[dingo]

Yep, I been looking at it for a couple months now. The best way to get A:M Characters and animation into .FBX is to use Obsidian Games .X exporter. Then use Polytrans. That seems to be the best solution that I have found thus far. And thank goodness for that .X exporter. Again it's A:M > .X > Polytrans > .FBX.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Edit: One thing to note though is that the you have to request the .FBX exporter for Polytrans after purchase. It's not part of the standard install, but you have to request it directly. The standard install of Polytrans has an FBX importer but not an exporter, but once you request it you can install the patch and it should be good.

 

Also of note, avoid five point patches and make sure all your normals are facing outward before exporting to .X

[gschumsky]

Yep, I been looking at it for a couple months now. The best way to get A:M Characters and animation into .FBX is to use Obsidian Games .X exporter. Then use Polytrans. That seems to be the best solution that I have found thus far. And thank goodness for that .X exporter. Again it's A:M > .X > Polytrans > .FBX.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Edit: One thing to note though is that the you have to request the .FBX exporter for Polytrans after purchase. It's not part of the standard install, but you have to request it directly. The standard install of Polytrans has an FBX importer but not an exporter, but once you request it you can install the patch and it should be good.

 

Also of note, avoid five point patches and make sure all your normals are facing outward before exporting to .X

That's just the info I was looking for!!

 

You are one awesome source of knowledge there Dingo! So, have you played with it at all?

 

I did send an email to the people at Unity and they said they've talked with Hash and are willing to support AM directly, but need a more open line of communication with them.

 

So for now, this might work.

 

Thanks again!

Greg

[gschumsky]

another pay for it engine sob! sob!

Yeah, but it's a pretty cheap engine for independant use (you paid for AM, right? Pretty cheap too, but if you want netrender for doing big stuff, then be prepared to pay a whole lot more).

 

Wa, wa, wa. Someone needs to call a Wambulance..

[dingo]

Yep, I been looking at it for a couple months now.  The best way to get A:M Characters and animation into .FBX is to use Obsidian Games .X exporter.  Then use Polytrans.  That seems to be the best solution that I have found thus far.  And thank goodness for that .X exporter.  Again it's A:M > .X > Polytrans > .FBX.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Edit:  One thing to note though is that the you have to request the .FBX exporter for Polytrans after purchase.  It's not part of the standard install, but you have to request it directly.  The standard install of Polytrans has an FBX importer but not an exporter, but once you request it you can install the patch and it should be good.

 

Also of note, avoid five point patches and make sure all your normals are facing outward before exporting to .X

That's just the info I was looking for!!

 

You are one awesome source of knowledge there Dingo! So, have you played with it at all?

 

I did send an email to the people at Unity and they said they've talked with Hash and are willing to support AM directly, but need a more open line of communication with them.

 

So for now, this might work.

 

Thanks again!

Greg

Thanks. Sorry for such a delayed response.

 

Regarding Unity directly supporting Hash, I wonder who talked to who. Joachim over a Unity really seems to be a great guy, actually all those guys seem to be really cool. Just as cool as the Hash guys.

[davidhelgason]

Hi guys,

 

When I contacted Hash I couldn't find a proper person to mail to, so I sent a mail to info@hash.com with an offer of collaboration. Don't seem to have gotten a response.

 

Maybe it landed in the wrong inbox (or might have been put in the Junk mailbox with the Nigerians).

 

Anyway, if the Hash developers see this you're welcome to contact me at david@otee.dk.

 

******

 

 

To your CEO or business development VP,

 

 

My name is David Helgason and I am the CEO of OTEE, makers of the game development platform Unity. You might have heard about us already. Unity, which was released at WWDC in June, is the next generation of game development tools: a stylish Mac-based pro app with the power of AAA engines under the hood.

 

You can find out more here: http://otee.dk

 

As we've gained users and popularity many of our users have asked us to provide A:M import support for Unity. The result will be happy customers of A:M and Unity, A:M being featured in our upcoming preferred tool partner program, and a press release highlighting the usefulness of A:M in game development.

 

In most cases this is not a lot of work either on our or your side, but requires a little coordination between our developers.

 

 

In short it's a question of identifying a common format (we already support several and are adding more, so this should not be a problem), and finding a way to run the export step in the background so it requires no manual steps. We of course do almost all the work.

 

 

I hope we can pursue this with you.

[gschumsky]

Hey David,

 

1st, great to see you here!

 

2nd, did you guys already get the Hash SDK? That could help some (from my understanding that's all the guy used from ArcticPigs to make it work...but I could be wrong).

 

3rd, get a hold of Steve or Ken at Hash.

 

4th, any chance you'll be supporting huge outdoor landscapes any time soon (we have a need to do a flight sim in our next game)?

 

 

Greg

 

 

edit: Steve Sappington is steve@hash.com. Ken Baer is baer@hash.com

Edited September 8, 2005 by gschumsky

[davidhelgason]

1) Hi Greg

 

2) We'll find out.

 

3) I just wrote them a mail with some more details, thanks for the addresses.

 

4) You can do it currently with some manual LOD control. But we are also collaborating with a group here in Copenhagen doing a 3rd person + strategy game, which will push the big-world support of Unity far.

 

 

Did you get to experiment with Unity?

[GusM]

Wow, A:M and Unity working together would be a really great game team

Let us know any advance.

 

Gustavo Muñoz

[dingo]

Hi David,

 

Welcome to the Hash forums. If the otee guys could create a plugin to work with Animation Master that would be great.

 

Here are a few forum threads you may be interested in:

 

Obsidian Games/Chris Roy currently makes a great plugin for A:M that exports .X format with animation here is a link a discussion of the latest version

 

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=13734

 

Also here is are links to threads discussing current Hash SDK's

 

Hash's new HA:MR Technology: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=16766

 

Can download the current SDK here: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5146

[gschumsky]

4) You can do it currently with some manual LOD control. But we are also collaborating with a group here in Copenhagen doing a 3rd person + strategy game, which will push the big-world support of Unity far.

 

 

Did you get to experiment with Unity?

Cool. Good news about big world support. Also, we're going to be needing network play as well in the game.

 

And yes, our programmers are playing with it nightly.

 

Greg

[Bighead]

Any news on this matter?

[Bighead]

Unity is quite an impressive engine.

 

Unluckily for PC users is a hard move jumping to the MAC world given that it mainly supports FBX, so for those who have AM it would be very handy to count on AM's file format in Unity.

 

EDIT: otherwise, more money should be spent so as to buy a license of a converter like "Polytrans" or so.

 

Also, this could benefit both, Unity and AM, since more developers may decide to join both communities.

[Bighead]

Anyway, it would be nice to see some news posted ...

 

A few days ago I sent a message to Hash stuff on this regard but I have not received any response yet.

[Bighead]

Well, good news for the export thingy ... sort of ...

 

The new version of Milkshape3D imports/exports FBX files, so if you need to export a FBX from AM just use AMTex to export it as X, then import it with Milkshape3D and finally convert it to FBX with the latter.

[gschumsky]

thats questiionable dont like mac

 

Plenty of nice engines, cheap too, for PC users. The nice thing about Unity is it's Mac only, thus all the extra gobbledygook needed to make a Win app (dll's and stuff) aren't needed, so the makers can focus on the core strengths of OSX.

 

Now, someone out there has to figure out a way to export fbx from AM.

 

 

 

Is there a Mac version of Milkshape? I googled it, and even checked the Milkshape site, but no luck.

And no, not buying a PC so I can use one program.

[Stuart Rogers]

The nice thing about Unity is it's Mac only .... Now, someone out there has to figure out a way to export fbx from AM.

Alias do offer a free SDK, for both Windows and Macs, so perhaps one of this forum's nice programmer people will take a look into creating an A:M FBX exporter.

[Bighead]

AMtex plus plus? ...

[Thirdwarlock]

This is my first post on the boards so please bear with me here.

 

I wanted to post on this Unity topic because I recently started toying with the Unity game engine demo. It seems that you can import .3ds files with the program. However, I am having a terrible time trying to get textures and meshes to work. I first thought it was because I was dumb and exporting the model files from AM wrong.

 

When you do an export from AM it will warn you during the export about file names and placing all the textures in the folder that the .3ds file gets exported to. However, if you just try to import a .tga or a .jpeg file into the Unity editor you get an error saying that all pictures must have powers of 2? I think this is why I'm having problems getting the textures to work.

 

On my journey in trying to find a work around for this I read a help file saying that the .fbx format was the best format to use for Unity. I read some posts here about ways to get your AM models into .fbx format. I found what I "think" is a great FREE application to do format conversions.

 

http://www.alias.com/glb/eng/products-serv...oductId=1900004

 

This .fbx converter program works like a champ on OSX 10.4. All that you have to do is drag your .3ds file on the applications window and then BAM... it instantly creates a .fbx file in the directory that the .3ds file was located in.

 

Like I said it's a free download and you have to sign up for a free account to log into their website and download any of the apps. Yea, I was willing to get some more SPAM in my inbox to test this. I only tried this out on OSX so far but I can only assume that more users of AM could benefit from this utility more than me. Because honestly, I don't really have a clue what I'm doing. =)

 

The sad end to my post is that I still could not get textures to load into the Unity Engine. /cry Even importing files from the .fbx format just loads a plain white model into the program. I am under the belief that it has something to do with the picture files that are originally used in AM. That error in Unity about picture sizes needing to be in powers of 2 confuses me. More info on that can be found here...

 

http://otee.dk/Documentation/Components/cl...ileTexture.html

 

The exact quote from Unity's website about texture sizes...

 

"Texture Sizes

In order for textures to work in real-time enignes, their size must be a power of two on the sides. The allowed sizes are as follows: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 or 1024 pixels. The textures do not need to have the same size horizontally and vertically, but each side have one of lengths mentioned above."

 

 

But anyway if any of you find that .fbx converter useful let me know. Sorry for the long first post.

 

-Tom

[dingo]

Hi Tom,

 

Congratulations on your first post. Read here maybe it will help. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=19990

[gschumsky]

That error in Unity about picture sizes needing to be in powers of 2 confuses me. More info on that can be found here...

 

http://otee.dk/Documentation/Components/cl...ileTexture.html

 

The exact quote from Unity's website about texture sizes...

 

"Texture Sizes

In order for textures to work in real-time enignes, their size must be a power of two on the sides. The allowed sizes are as follows: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 or 1024 pixels. The textures do not need to have the same size horizontally and vertically, but each side have one of lengths mentioned above."

 

-Tom

 

In other words, it's looking for any images that are in some multiple of the number two, resolution wise. So, 800x600, 1024x768, 10x10, 4x4, 32x32, and so on. Any image that is say 15x13, or any odd number will not work. Though I haven't tried this, take one of your images from the output into Photoshop, look at the image or canvas size. If it has any odd numbers, then change the canvas size with either a black, white or whatever is the major color as the background so both width and height are some multiple of 2 (so if your image is 529x633, change the canvas size to 530x634).

Worth a shot and hope that helps.

And thanks for the link as well

 

Greg

 

 

edit: Well just read the last thing you had posted in there from Unity. I'd try my approach by "even-ing" the numbers and see if it works. If not then make the image canvas size using the numbers unity gives and try again. Never hurts to try.