3D objects production path

[techbear]

Grrr! I'm frustrated!

I've been working with an old hand-me-down license of MAX 2 for years now. I felt I needed it to work with what contract artists would send me, but now I'm ready to ditch it.

I've built and upgraded .ASE loaders for a while now, and my latest upgrade was to add animation information. I want to make a segmented man walking in MAX 2, and export his animation rotations as well as his mesh and positions.

BUT, it's become obvious that 1) the .ASE format contains rotation info as a 3x3matrix, and 2) that matrix is in a different rotation precedence than DirectX (apparently). My animated models come out moving like drunkards, and even shrinking and growing! Grrr.

So, what do YOU use? What toolsets do you use to get walking people and stomping robots from the artist and into your game?

Thanks!

[RedKnight]

I do it with Milkshape3d.
I've my own Ms3d loader, renderer(with cell shading) and with skeletal animation.

[Night Elf]

It shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to translate that matrix into a Direct3D firendly one. I don't know the .ASE format, so I can't help much, but the idea would be to extract the rotation information form the .ASE matrix (you can get either the xyz euler angles or a rotation quaternion) and then build a D3D rotation matrix from that information.

[Reactor]

I don't have an experience with the .ASE format, but I personally use Softimage XSI. It depends what you're after though.

Have you checked out google, and had a look for .ase converters?

[Carrot]

For animated figures in Gizmo I 've used Poser. There was a free version around a year or so ago, but can't find a link to it for you. Maybe you#ll hav more luck yourself.
Poser allows you to easily model walking/fighting/jump etc animations that can be exported as BVH files. These motion capture files can be imported into Milkshape quite easily (search for BVH importer of Milkshape).
For the actual modeling, I swear by Wings, though Milkshape is needed for most file-format conversions.

[Coyote]

Okay - risking attacks for derailing the thread, why do you prefer Wings over Milkshape?

[luggage]

we use lightwave and can load the files directly. It makes it sooo much easier for development this way. We then have the option to cache the files out in our own format which loads much much faster.