Darkplaces MD3 Exporter

Revision as of 00:59, 20 September 2013

exporter main window

export results window

Darkplaces MD3 Exporter - a plugin for 3D Studio Max to export MD3 models developed by Pavel [VorteX] Timofeyev.

Plugin code is based on Pop'N'Fresh's MD3 exporter for MAX3.

Goals are:

• Clean up and improve for use with recent versions of 3DS MAX
• Provide reliable tool that gives warning for each thing that is wrong and needs to be fixed for correct exporting
• Export good MD3's with correct normals and material names with no need of post-fixing
• Remove some old Quake 3-related switches (such as torso/legs exporting, object names filtering) not used with Darkplaces engine

General features (provided by Pop'N'Fresh plugin)

• Export Quake 3 MD3 models
• Export animations (frame ranges, can set several ranges separated by ,)
• Export tags (objects which names starts with tag_)
• Export current materials as shadernames (detect root by searching for textures/ in bitmap path)

Features added

• Fixed normals exporting to entirely match MD3 specs (some cases with pure vertical normals wasnt exported right before)
• Support for smoothing groups and edit normals modifier
• Better exporting of mirrored objects (ones having negative scale), warning are given anyway as max sometimes doesnt have valid data structures for mirrored objects, and this cant be autofixed during exporting
• Can export primitives
• Can get material name from multimaterial's first layer (some importers, like COLLADA, always sets multimaterial)
• New "create tag_pivot for pivot position" option to create tag for object's pivot (useful for defining center of mass or light sampling point)
• New "export chunks" option to export separate .md3 model for each selected object
• Option to detect "collision" and "shadow" meshes, this meshes always exported 'as is' with no additional seams added (UV are null, vertex normals are null)
• Export results window with prints about missing normals, bogus mesh names, null materials etc.
• Advanced paths exporting (autoconverting \ to /, support path in material name, detects "textures/", "models/", "gfx/" as path root)
• Fixed UV exporting to use vertex channels instead of legacy getVert/getNumTVerts (sometimes this legacy structures are empty)
• Test shader script output
• Frame range defaults to 0

Downloads

• Darkplaces MD3 Exporter GitHub repository
• Darkplaces MD3 Exporter 1.0 for Max 7
• Darkplaces MD3 Exporter 1.0 for Max 2011 x86 (untested)
• Darkplaces MD3 Exporter 1.0 for Max 2011 x64 (untested)
• Darkplaces MD3 Exporter 1.0 for Max 2012 x86
• Darkplaces MD3 Exporter 1.0 for Max 2012 x64

See also

• NPherno's MD3 Compiler
• Chris Cookson's 3ds Max MD3 Importer
• 3ds Max ASE Import plugin