From a 3D modeler to an iPhone app - what are best practices?
- by bonkey
I am quite new in 3D programming on iPhone and I would like
to ask for hints about organizing a work between designers
and programmers on that platform. Most of all: what kind of
tools, libraries or plugins cooperate the best on both
sides.
Although I consider the question as looking for general
best-practices advice I would like to find a solution for
my current situation which I describe further, too.
I've already done some research and found following libraries:
SIO2
Khronos OpenGL ES 1.x SDK for PowerVR MBX
Unity3D
Oolong Game Engine
I've checked modellers or plugins to them giving output formats
readable by those tools:
obj2opengl Wavefront OBJ to plain header file converter
Blender with SIO2 exporter
iphonewavefrontloader
Cheetah3D
PVRGeoPOD for 3DS / Maya
Unfortunately I still have no clear vision how to combine
any of that tools to get a desinger's work in an application.
I look for a way of getting it in the most possible complete way:
models, lights, scenes, textures, maybe some simple animations
(but rather no game-like physics), but I still got nothing.
And here comes my situation: I would like to find right way to
present few (but quite complicated) models from a single scene.
The designers mostly use 3DS Max 9, sometimes 10 (which partly
prevents using PVRGeoPOD) and are rather reluctant to switch to
something else but if there's no other choice I suppose it would
be possible.
The basic rule I've already found in some places "use Wavefront
OBJ" not always works. I haven't got any acceptable results with
production files, actually. The only things worked fine were some
mere examples. Some of my models did imported incomplete, sometimes
exporters hung or generated enormous files not really useful on
an iPhone, sometimes enabling textures (with GL_TEXTURE_2D) just
crashed an app.
I know it might be a problem with too complicated models or my
mistakes coming from inexeperience but I am not able to find any
guidelines for that process to have streamlined cooperation with
designers.
I am even willing to write some things from scratch in pure
OpenGL-ES if it's necessary, but I would like to avoid what might
be avoided and get the most from the model files. The best would be
the effect I saw on some SIO2 tutorials: export, build & go. But
at that moment I've got only "import, wrong", "import, where are
textures?", "import, that almost looks fine, export, hang" and so
on...
Is it really so much frustrating or I am just missed something
obvious? Can anybody share his/her experience in that field and
tell what kind of software uses for "making things happen"?
