Except i use 3dsmax and i dont want to download and learn another completely different modelling program. Blender cant even export/import fully to 3dsmax.

Well i've never used 3dsmax, but there is an import/export plugin included in the newest blender release.

I noticed and i tried it out. It doesnt work the greatest and it only exports the mesh and nothing else.

Agree i would prefer use for "GMAX" Not my prefered use of
modeling software, but acceptable.. Im a Rhino (man) and you
can thank old TA for that. which started me modeling.
now a new beginning.

Blender no freaking way, it wont ewen run on my comp. lol

Modeling units is done, convertion is needed..
i model i dont code. i mean shouldnt it be possible to export your
model in a "known" format, then have a convertion program
make a batch convertion of a folder to the SCM or SCA as needed.

Saves people alot of trouble creating "add-ins" for several modeling
softwares. and only 1 piece of software for all to use
regardless what they pref of modeling software would be.

I guess that could work. The only trouble would be to get some who KNOWS how to program the necessary file formats. I would think the formats would be limited however since the models need to include bones and I dont think many formats support that feature (I think).

problem with gmax is the price for the gmax sdk is crazy. thats why it died out so fast.

Hi. First Post!

I've been using 3ds max for some time now. I am currently using version 8. And while I can program somewhat, I've never touched the 3ds max SDK. So, I decided to install it today. Turns out there's stuff in there for exporting and importing data formats. It's called the 3ds Max Data Exchange Interface. I'm reading up on in now.

3ds Max Data Exchange Interface Programmer's Guide: Introduction

If anyone here has used the 3DXI before, and can provide some insight, please let me know. I'm using VS C++ 2005, 3ds max 8, and 3DXI 2.2 for max 8.

Sounds promising. Looking forward to hearing you make progress on this.

This might be useful:

The reason you normally have to wait for model tools for games is not simply the lack of developer software but the lack of INFORMATION. Most of the time (for instance with Dawn Of War) the formats have to be decompiled first. This means some poor soul has to try reading a binary file byte-by-byte to figure out what is going on.

With Dawn Of War, Relic only supported 3DS 7 (they supported the free 'Gmax' version but later took that out) which means modders were expected to spend thousands of dollars to put models in DOW. This was unlikely to happen since most modders are still in high school.

This is a different situation. GPG have released the information. A competent 3DS/Blender/Maya plugin writer could probably turn that information into a plugin in under a week. We're not talking about months of waiting here.

This issue is caused by licensing restrictions on the relevant 3rd-party export plugins. Now as an open-source developer I could just say it serves GPG right for relying on closed-source tech, but I also realise that often it's preferable to not re-invent the wheel. A plugin existed that did what they needed and they used it - no crime there. They just can't give it away.

Frankly I don't care because I find 3DS Max to be clumsy and overpriced anyway. The free Wings 3D and Blender suites do everything I need and do it better. I would rather see the Blender plugin improve than have a closed-source 3DS plugin and no format specification.

EDIT: That comment about Blender not running sounds like bull. I've run it on a PIII with no issues. If you can can run SupCom you can run Blender.

If any lightwave plugin writers read this, please please consider writing an scm plugin, I can't stand 3ds max.

what would be cool is if someone would write FBX converters, so we could use almost any modeling/animation tool and have a fairly straight path for conversion.

for anyone who doesnt know, FBX is about the closest thing there is to an advanced (i.e. not .3ds) universal 3d format. its pretty much an autodesk thing now, since they own 3dsmax and maya, but its got plugins out there for a few more apps too, including wings 3d (free), lightwave, and XSI. i'm not sure what all it supports, but i'm pretty sure it covers enough to support all the features needed for supcom. (multiple UV sets for normal maps, skeletons, animation, etc)

also.. the file formats were released by GPG with python headers. maya just added native python support for plugins. i'd be in way over my head if i tried that right now... but uh... anyone? =] python? maya? ??

Hey, I'm no modeller, but I'm well versed in programming. I've never written a plugin for anything more than Gaim before, so it probably wouldn't be very time effective for me to try to write a plugin for any of the modelling software out there. HOWEVER, I really like the sound of a seperate program that will convert one file format to another. Then it would work with any (all?) modelling programs. It would also be doable within a reasonable time frame for me.

As you can probably tell, my knowledge of anything modelling related is slim, so if you could let me know whether this approach is worthwhile and if so, what file formats I should be looking at then that would be great!

I can't wait to start seeing lots of custom models in the game!

Thanks,
James

If you seriously want to give this a crack then youll have the support adoration of the entire modding community behind you.

Someone earlier said to look at the .fbx filetype so that may be a good place to start assuming it can handle all the various things contained in the .scm and .sca filetypes.

ok... well.. like i said, FBX. http://www.autodesk.com/fbx
theres the main FBX page, you can get lots of info from there, and download the SDK, etc. between the supcom formats released here, and that info, that should be enough for someone with a C++ clue to get rolling on a converter. it definitely seems to support everything we need, i just looked thru the lists of FBX features i could find, and the supcom file format, and i dont see anything in supcom that isnt in FBX. i would be way over my head if i tackled something like this myself, but i'm willing to help out with the project, if someone else is leading it.

now a question for the devs, if they're paying attention:

i assumed supcom didnt support weighted mesh skinning, because i didnt see it anywhere. and then i saw this:

so uh... which is it? =] was it taken out, or can we still skin them? can we make giant dragons to fight our robots or not? =]

Supcom has to support skinning. There would be no other way to animate the meshes. The restriction is that any vertex can only be weighted to a single bone (with a value of 1). You could call it rigid skinning. Vertexes cannot be weighted to more than one bone (partially to one and partially to another).

Basically you can ski your mesh however you want with the only restriction being that a vertex can only be weighted to a single bone with a value of 1 and a value of zero for all others. At least thats how i understood things.

Hi, since I had a little time, I started a converter FBX2SupCom. I don't know if I will have time to finish it soon so don't get your hope too high .

I have a small question for the dev:

in the header file from this topic, it is said:



but in the python script, there is:



which seems to me to align on 32 byte block. So which one is the good answer?

by opening the sample scm, I have found 32 byte aligned (but 32 byte aligned is 16 byte aligned so...).

Also, it says: 'the next section is x-byte aligned', but it seems it is the start of the data of the section which is aligned (4 byte after the start of the section since there is an FOURCC), is that correct?

Finally, can I put anything I want in the INFO section(like the date of creation, the tools and the authors)?

I suppose I could juste do as in the python script but conflicting information lead to bugs and incompatibilities.

EDIT:
I don't see where the tangent and binormals are in the fbx (perhaps in users atributs), so I will recompute them from the first set of UV. Is this a problem? I suppose that they should be normalized (as the normal) and orthogonal (to each others and to the normal) for the shaders to work correctly, but I may be wrong?

Here's a question for GPG, I've only got VB6 in work, and I got bored. So I decided to just read the sample model with your header files (Translated of course). Can you tell me what the vertex count on the sample SupComSCM_lod0.scm model is? I just want to check everything is ok so far.

[edit] btw, here's my current reading of the header file, I hate VB, C++ makes this so much easier:

File Name: E:\test\SupComSCM_lod0.scm
FourCC: MODL
Version: 5
Bone Offset: 128
Weighted Bone Count: 6
Vertex Offset: 800
Vertex Extra Offset: 0
Vertex Count: 5043
Index Offset: 343744
Index Count: 10032
Info Offset: 363840

uploaded it to 1 of the domains i control (its a games domain for the club that pays for the site and for me to run it)

http://www.nukezone.trentvalleyarchers. ... ormats.rar

Wouldn't mind seeing a plugin for Shade 7...Seems more than a little unlikely, though.

I realised my index count is different to gpg's python script. Looks like I've got more work, and do you think I can get vb to read the bone data? can i buggery.

Not quite working as intended yet:

http://janvanderweg.com/supcom/scmimporter.jpg

Got some problems with the triangle lists and when opening the scm that is provided with the format docs I get some funky errors.

If all goes well I hope to have a fully functional importer for 3smax in a day or two. An exporter would take a bit longer since I'd have to read some more of the maxscript reference. I'm making it in maxscript (my first foray into maxscript \o/) so it should be compatible with older versions too.



Your index offset and count is way off.



The header is 12 blocks of 4 bytes. indexcount is the 9th one. Maybe you are reading it incorrectly?



I see no reason why you can't make the INFO section as big as you want.

It just said supcom doesn't use more than one bone per vert weight.

welp
Fixed the triangle list error

http://janvanderweg.com/supcom/scmimporter2.jpg

It was:

Should have been:


whoops >_>

the comments in the format imply that it was removed from the format entirely. it wasnt clear, so i was asking.

btw awesome work so far. is that a 3ds plugin, an FBX converter, or what?

It's still a bit fuzzy to me too, I'd like to have some clarification from gpg as well.

It's a maxscript plugin for 3dsmax, it should work for older max versions too which is nice. I made it on max9, autodesk might have changed some functions with maxscript.

It reads a specified .scm file and creates a mesh object in max.

If I have enough time I'll probably make some scripts for blender too since its free.

Some more progress:
http://janvanderweg.com/supcom/scmimporter3.jpg

It now loads the model and texture verts. Still need to flip the tverts on the y-axis and fix/clean up the script some more.

Also, why does supcom support two uv sets? I seriously can't think of any reason why you'd need a second set.