Getting 3D Model data in my engine, Part 2
As told in part1 I’ve written an exporter based on the “Sample Content Exporter” from the DirectX March SDK.
The process of getting the 3D model data into my engine now works as following. My 3D Content gets created in any tool which supports exporting to .fbx, .3ds, .obj or even .collada. Most tools support one or more formats of these. So the import site of the project is really great and supports major file formats supported by major tools. 
The 3d data now gets imported into the “Sample Content Exporter”. This is using the Autodesk SDK. It was actually written for the FBX SDK 2009.1 but it’s working without any problems using the new 2010.0 version.
The intermediate format used is easy to export, most data is already in game ready form so it just has to be exported.
The export formats supported by the tool, as found in the DirectX SDK, just supports .xatg(used by the XBoxSDK samples) and .sdkmesh(this is used by the windows samples).
So all the infrastructure for exporting meshes is already in place and the code designed for exporting content.
So I started writing an exporter for my own model format, and it really work great. But it’s not perfect yet. The exporting of the actual mesh data is working currently but exporting of textures doesn’t work yet, but I’ll try to add this tomorrow. But as I’m the only one using this exporter in the moment this is not such an big problems. Because my format is designed to be easy editable by hand, so I can fix such problems really quick.
This is the test model I used for testing my exporter while developing it. As XNA developer you may noticed it already, it’s the rocket from the XNA SpaceWar Starter kit. Content that worked in xna, which also uses the FBX SDK for importing, will also work and can be exported to my own custom format.
In the next post I ‘want to talk a little bit about how the “jenmodel” format is designed, what is supported currently and what makes it different from other formats, already existing.
