X42 Exporter

The x42 format supports skeletal animation for arbitrary objects. It's designed to be as graphics hardware friendly as possible; in fact, the format basically consists of the skeleton info, a vertex and index buffer, and some draw calls. However, it's also set up to be efficient on the CPU.

maya2q3

Welcome to the official development site of the maya2q3 project. Here you'll (eventually) find all you need to know to get up and running with the maya2q3 plugin. It is developed against Maya 7. Older revisions had Maya 6 support, however that's been dropped as I don't have the time to test two revisions of the plugin.

If anyone is interested in supporting older versions of Maya, let me know. The code already has a system in place for multi-version support, all it needs is someone to fill in the appropriate #if blocks.

The plugin has three major features:

MD3 Exporter

maya2q3 provides a file translator into the MD3 format. The exporter is geared towards static scene objects (for placement in Radiant).

You can, in theory, use it to export characters, but you'll have to do a lot of work by hand as there is no code to specifically deal with characters. We're using x42 to deal with characters in our project so I won't be adding character code to the MD3 exporter any time in the future, either. If you want character support you're welcome to add it to the code base. If your solution is elegant, let me know and I'll patch it into the repository for others to use as well.

BSP Importer

I've found that having the map's geometry around makes modelling environmental objects much easier. To that end I've added a simple BSP importer to maya2q3. It's very basic. It only imports the vertex positions and completely ignores normals, uvs, and shaders (though these could be added later, I suppose). It also makes no attempt to weld vertices or remove redundant edges (this will likely be included as it will make the imported meshes much more efficient).

What it does do is get the scale right. Anything that's modelled against the imported surfaces will export (via the MD3 or x42 exporters) to match the size of the original BSP. Just don't change your Maya distance units half way through modelling a scene.

The Q3Shader Node

This hardware shader node is built around a Quake 3 shader to ARB_vertex_program converter. It began life as an expirament on automating the transition between Quake 3 style shaders and hardware vertex shaders, and ended up turning into a live preview of a Quake 3 shader in Maya's interactive windows.

It does have bugs, and it's most of the reason the plugin is still flagged as BETA. If anyone's using this, please, send bug reports.

Downloading and Installing

Building From Code

If you plan to build from source, you can check out the latest code from the Subversion repository. Anonymous read access to the repository is available to all at http://svn.hermitworksentertainment.com/maya2q3/svn/.

The repository contains a Visual Studio 8 (compatible with Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition) solution and project files with build targets for Maya 6.0 (no longer supported - these might not build) and Maya 7.0 (supported and under active development). The project is set up with a custom build step that will copy the output files to your Maya folder. The paths are set up to point to Maya's default install directory, you'll have to modify the them if you run Maya from somewhere else.

Scott has a makefile in place for building under Linux, but I don't know too much about it or anything else relating to the Linux build so talk to him if you want more info on that.

If you're working with the source and have something to contribute to the project, please email your patches to me (Phill). If you would like to take on a larger role than the occasional patch submition and want write access to the repository then email me and we'll work something out.

Downloading Binaries

There are no prepackaged binaries for this project. There used to be, but I didn't (and still don't) have the time to keep them up to date so they're no longer available. The repository has (fairly) up to date binaries in it. If you want to just grab those and run then you'll need the following three files (on Windows):

  • maya2q3.mll which goes in $(ProgramFiles)\Alias\Maya7.0\bin\plug-ins
  • AEQ3ShaderTemplate.mel which goes in $(ProgramFiles)\Alias\Maya7.0\scripts\AETemplates
  • maya2q3.mel which goes in $(ProgramFiles)\Alias\Maya7.0\scripts\others

If you installed Maya somewhere other than its default or are working with a different version, simply adjust the target path. After you've got the files copied over, restart Maya and load up the plugin and you're ready to go. The exporters will show up as file types when you hit File | Export All or File | Export Selected and the Q3Shader node will show up with the other material types.

Contact

Phill Djonov: phill@hermitworksentertainment.com
Plugin features and Win32 support.
Scott Brooks: scott@hermitworksentertainment.com
Linux support issues.