The fnal word on Direct X

[ouch]

@Tamarin

Thanks Ben,

Your example files work well so I should be able to get my own.

When I use Bens script on a cube I get 12 faces and 24 verts. After welding the mesh in MS MView, as described in Bens tutorials, I end up with 12 faces (12 triangles makes sense) and 14 verts. The nice thing about this is that the UV mapping and animation remain the same.

Thanks

heh, the panda your thinking of is an 3d engine.

the panda I’m thinking of is purely an .x exporter for 3d studio max.
http://www.andytather.co.uk/Panda/directxmax.aspx

and to the blender devs: this exporter has done everything I have ever needed. So ideally just make a clone of it for blender…

What? like that’s hard?

also:

@GeoffW

Hi Ouch

Regarding the exporter increasing the verts count on the cube.

This happens because that specific exporter dumps verts from the face list, so you would get 6 * 4 = 24 verts rather than 8

Try using the alternative X exporter, (the direct Python one suffix _DP) this code dumps verts from the vertex list, so you only get 8 verts.

Regards Geoff

Directx (and posibbly the .x format itself) only supports tri’s so it’s really 12 * 3 = 36. But I’ve tried I think 3 different version (3 different authors too I believe) of .x exporters with less then stellar results.

[GeoffW]

Hi Ouch

Nope, the .X format will quite happily cope with Quads or Tris without a problem. The Blender exporter dumps both as required.

The thing that didnt seem to work properly for me was the normals exporting.

Option 1 Blender normals seemed to give smoothed faces everywhere
Option 2 Re-calc normals seemed to give smoothed faces everywhere
Option 3 No Smooth normals worked as expected but the no smoothing is on a global basis.

This wasnt good if you have a Blender scene something like

Anyways after a bit of head scratching I managed to figure out a tweak to the exporter code for the normals recalculation option . Looks like what I was trying to achieve now

This is what the export looks like in MS Direct X viewer now

Geoff

[alexedwin]

Hi

I have tried other programs all OK:yes:
But, x files exported from Blender DO NOT WORK in Rule the rails.:mad:

[GeoffW]

Hi

Please post the blend file so we can take a look at it and try and understand the problem.
Just saying it doesnt work, isnt going to solve anything.

   Geoff

[Vek]

For if you’re having a problem with exporting normals:

I find that the most reliable way to export to ANY game format, not just X, is to use the ‘edgesplit’ modifier in the stack to split the mesh along seams prior to export. Then just use the 'everything is smooth ’ (no auto smoothing threshhold) option on the exporter (and the mesh).
Hopefully this works for your X files too. I find that in some exporters I have to ‘apply’ the split modifier before the exporter “sees” it.

[henry38]

Re the default exporter in blender dumping the vertices from the face list and thus duplicating vertices, I believe that is because a face in 3D view would be separated from an adjacent face on the uv map if a seam ran between the two faces in the 3D view. Thus a vertex occurring on a seam will occur in more than one location on the uv map, i.e. it has been given a separate pair of uv coordinates for every occurrence of it on the uv map. The exporter deals with this problem by producing one xyz copy of a vertex for every face that it belongs to, and assigning identical uv coordinates or different uv coordinates to the copies if the vertex occurs once on the uv map or more than once respectively. This should explain why some alternative exporters, that export vertices from the vertex list, do not display textures correctly.