I am planning on making a smallish game. I’ve made some simple games before, but only in 2D, not 3D. Now I think I can OpenGL sufficiently so I can have a go at making a game.
What is a good and royalty/license free 3D modeler program that I could use for modeling and animating the “player” and “monster” objects ?
I am not making a Quake IV or V, just a simple 3D platform jump’em-up. I was thinking of 3DS MAX/Character Studio, is it simple (enough) to load the models and implement the animation in my own programs?
when you are using the 3Dmax sdk, yes its easy. …and take a look at the ASE-format. it exports MAX files into an ASCII-format. very easy to understand.
How about modeling the world/levels in the game ? Is 3DSMAX ok for that ? I am most probably going to implement some kind of simple visibility set scheme: The level is divided into parts (boxes), and the visibility set would be just a data set of which parts of the level are visible from the part where the camera is when rendering a frame.
But, as I said it’s not going to be very complicated. Just a basic “world” with textures and some lights, perhaps.
3dsMax is definitely not cheap. Another great alternative for models is MilkShape. It costs about $30, imports and exports most major file formats, has it’s own well documented file format, and is designed towards low poly modeling. It even supports uv-mapping and skeletal animation.(Although Ultimate Unwrap and Character FX may be better tools for this).
Milkshape looks promising, and doesn’t have as complex gadgetry as 3DSMAX, which I find a good thing. I wonder whether it’s good for level modeling though…
jwatte:
Good point, but although it was perhaps not very clear in my original post, the main thing I am interested in the easiness of reading and using the models/levels with OpenGL, so I think this would be a suitable forum for that… now that you mentioned it, gamedev.net would perhaps be a better place.
