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Back in October 1999, Lambsoft quietly released a flagship product called Movetools, a file converter for 3D Studio Max, Softimage, and Maya. Since its release, artists and animators in the game industry have been flocking to the product, which is rapidly gaining a reputation as the final word in file translation. This month, I had a chance to test drive the software and put it through its paces, and as you read on, you'll see I was pretty pleased with the results.
Why Do You Need a Converter?
To artists and animators with experience in the industry, the answer to this question is obvious and comes in two parts. First, one classic problem in game development is that there is usually no single piece of software which encapsulates all the functionality needed by developers. Typically, studios end up using one platform for animation, another for modeling and texturing, and yet a third for exporting the data into the game engine. Mixing and matching tools can be a tempting solution, but the trade-off is substantial, since time will inevitably be wasted managing the different naming conventions, file formats, and animation protocols specific to each tool.
The second part of the answer has to do with personnel. While the feature sets for each of the big three platforms have been converging, artists and animators still tend to be experts in only one tool. The ideal scenario, then, is to let animators work in the environment in which they are most experienced, which means more pressure on everyone else to incorporate those tools with which they are familiar.
It's clear that having the ability to integrate content seamlessly from multiple software packages is a powerful benefit not to be undervalued. This is precisely the functionality that Movetools promises to deliver.
Methodology
Basically, Movetools works as a plugin for each of the three platforms. The Movetools tile structure, which is based on Alias|Wavefront's venerable .OBJ format, serves as the hub of a wheel through which each of the three platform plug-ins communicates. In order to get files from Maya into Softimage, for example, the Maya content is exported into an intermediate Movetools scene database, which is then imported directly into Softimage with little or no loss of information. The...