The 3D Studio MAX plug-ins

IOI Technologies

The Glacier System

Background and Vision
Overview
The 3D Studio MAX plug-ins
The programming source development kit
The virtual scene composer/editor
The real-time virtual scene player
Other Glacier features

Background and Vision

The Glacier system has been under development for 5 years starting back in 1994. The idea emerged out of our experiences with creating a couple of games for various platforms. For each new game we had to start from scratch: Setting up a new building and playing environment, creating new graphics and code as well as utilities and learning the combined work-flow. Close to nothing from the previous project could be reused.

Our vision and mission became to build a system so flexible and extensible that we would never need to start from scratch again. This system should be a whole working-environment and include/enable:

Cross-platform compatibility - cutting development costs and time and allowing console-players, pc-players etc. to meet eachother online.

Scalable workload - limiting bottlenecks in the work process and making very large projects feasible.

Very dynamic worlds - giving the ability to manipulate everything in the world in realtime without any preprocessing, a very cool feature that has two very important sideeffects:

1. Making it possible to test everything that is being set up right away without any preprocessing delays.

2. Minimizing the bandwidth needed for preprocessed data which is very important for any online happening.

Online functionality and efficiency - making realtime fast-responding interactive / noninteractive applications a real possibility

Overview

Glacier consists of 4 distinct modules, each of which contains a large number of tools and objects.
The 4 modules are:

1. The 3D Studio MAX plug-ins(the plug-ins).
2. The programming source development kit(the SDK).
3. The virtual scene composer/editor(the editor).
4. The real-time virtual scene player(the player).

Together these modules make it easy to integrate custom build graphics, sounds/music and functionality into one virtual scene and watch the combined result in real-time.

Simplified Glacier work-flow

The 3D Studio MAX plug-ins

A collection of different plug-ins for 3D Studio MAX has been developed for use with the Glacier system.

The main purpose of the plug-ins is to export 3D Environments (build up from 3D objects, lights, cameras etc.) and animations in a format the remaining part of the Glacier system can read and understand. Other parts of the plug-ins add functionality to 3D MAX through source safe control, texture mapping utilities, animation viewers etc.

Here is a brief description of each plug-in.

The render plug-in (Utility)
The corner stone is the render plug-in. It is responsible for extracting information from the MAX scene, manipulate it, and execute different converters. The final output is files ready to be loaded by the Glacier system.
The plug-in allows to instantly view your creation, complete with dynamic and static lights/shadows, in real-time using the Glacier system.
This plug-in also maintains the master object database, which is described along with the master objects below.

The Settings plug-in (Utility)
One of the goals has been to support as much of the functionality and feature set supplied by 3D Studio MAX as possibly. Thus standard MAX object settings used to control the final output when rendering your scene in MAX will in most cases affect the output by the render plug-in in a similar manner. The settings plug-in is used to assign additional properties to objects within the scene. Some of these properties will affect how the objects are rendered by the pre-renderer, while others will control how objects are rendered by the real time renderer.

The Master-Object Plug-in (object)
This plug-in allows you to select objects from the master object database and insert them into the MAX scene as you would any other type of primitive, like boxes, spheres etc. When you insert the objects they will appear in the fast render view completely with pre-rendered light and shadows.
Creating a database with pre-rendered objects greatly reduces the time needed for creating complex environments as you simply build a library consisting of different building blocks like wall pieces, chairs tables, lamps etc. It furthermore has the advantage of reducing render time as the objects have already been rendered (at the time you create them).

The Animation control plug-in (Utility)
The animation plug-in extracts information about animations applied to hierarchical linked structures, such as biped-skeletons and bones. It outputs a file describing animation sequences, which can be loaded and played back(applied to characters) by the Glacier system. This can be anything from hand-animated objects to motion captured data.

The mapping editor plug-in (modifier)
This plug-in enables you to easily manipulate the mapping coordinates of objects. This is very useful when you are designing objects (such as characters) where regular mapping methods do not suffice.

The source control plug-in (Utility)
This plug-in interfaces with the Microsoft visual source safe program. This is a program that ensures that only one person at a time can work with the same file. This makes it very easy for more people to work on the same project. All files accessed by the plug-ins plus 3D Studio MAX scene files can be source controlled, through this plug-in.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16