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| Obduction Backer |
Joined: Sun Aug 12, 2007 6:15 am
Posts: 587
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As of my last posting here, I'd downloaded and installed the free version of 3DS Max that Mystdee had pointed out to us: Gmax.
I've now spent a day or so playing with it, and it's quite amazing what they're providing free-of-charge.
Gmax was designed for the gaming community, so Autodesk (the owners of 3DStudio) did certain things to tailor Max to gamers' needs, and also to make Gmax somewhat unusable as a general-purpose 3D graphics program. They've kept almost all of 3DS' modeling features, so it's really strong in that area.
The supplied tutorials are really good, step-by-step, and they work properly. Here's a tutorial I knocked out in a day (without using any of the tutorial's pre-modeled material) including an additional crude environment and skydome and camera animation. This was screen-captured using CamStudio. No, I wasn't finessing anything - it was just to see what Gmax could do, and it was my first time playing with the 3DS approach in nearly 10 years, so the learning curve was almost like starting from scratch!
I believe they've stripped out some of the texturing features, believing that sophisticated textures would not be needed in most games. Although Gmax has a rudimentary UV editing window, this site's tutorial shows that it is possible to do moderately advanced work with it. However, I haven't seen the ability to stencil textures, for example.
The worst part of Gmax, for us at this point, is that the whole premise of Gmax is that the export to games would be done using a plug-in exporter written custom for that game, a.k.a. a Gamepak (sound familiar?)
See the header page for the Gmax forums to get an idea of the games using Gmax gamepaks so far (beside the FPS games, there are flight and train simulator gamepaks, and Gmax is used to create assets for There as well). Based on that premise, Autodesk has stripped out any and all other means of saving data, but for a proprietary .gmax format. There are apparently ways of saving data out to various game formats and then converting that data back to a .3ds or other format, but these sound awkward and problematic to say the least. And from what I gather, the gamepaks are written by the game developers themselves, who must purchase a Gmax SDK (Software Developers' Kit) for some considerable price.
In short, it seems like Gmax is a great learning tool. For anyone considering purchasing 3DSMax, it would be an excellent way to determine whether the Max interface suited your taste. But it's possible that it has too many features stripped out to produce Cyan-quality ages, and even if that were possible it's unlikely that the export plug-in would get written so that we could use Gmax to create MORE ages (Gmax SDK = $$$). Unless, of course, through some improbable miracle the existing Cyan 3DS plug-in worked with Gmax....
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David Smith has collected a huge number of Gmax-related resources here, as well as having written many very handy MaxScript functions elsewhere on his site.
Here's a long list of Gmax tutorials, some general, some written by gamers aiming for their own select interests.
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I can understand why it'd be annoying though. And Gahreesen always made me wonder simultaneously what possessed htem to make it that way, and just what other way they were supposed to try anyways.
