Just wondering how other programmers feel about general art production paths. In my last project I was responsible for writing the plugins for 3DSMax for our art assets. This had the advantage of allowing me fast access to the plugins to make changes to what is allowed in our character exporter or world builder. On the other hand, it was using MAXSDK, which is royal pain in the butt. For my next project I’m thinking of adopting a hybrid approach where one of our technical artist (read: artist who can program) is writing stuff in maxscript to spit out data to a text file which I will then compile into a binary asset for our engine. This has the advantage of being able to leverage MaxScript (which IMHO, gives you more useful information than MAXSDK) and it is far less of a headache for me to write an asset compilier than an asset exporter. The downside is that exporting is now a two step proccess, and until the first step is completed (the script) if I want a temp asset I have to bug an artist (insert cracks about artists hours here).
For those of you who are still working with inhouse technology that isn’t quite mature yet, how do you deal with the pain of asset creation during the feature implementation phase of 3d engine creation?
[This message has been edited by rgreene (edited 04-21-2003).]