EAE6320_Assignment7_WriteUp

Details of Assignment:

• The main objective of the assignment was to export objects from Maya and use it in our game

 

Running Part of Game:

• The game has following controls:
  • “W” is used to move object forward(z+)
  • “S” is used to move object backward(z-)
  • “A” is used to move object left(x+)
  • “D” is used to move object right(x-)
  • “E” is used to move object up(y+)
  • “Q” is used to move object down(y-)
  • “SPACE” is used to change object geometry
  • “TAB” is used to switch between objects
  • “UP” is used to move camera forward(z+)
  • “DOWN” is used to move camera backward(z-)
  • “LEFT” is used to move camera left (x-)
  • “RIGHT” is used to move camera right (x+)
  • “PAGE UP” is used to move camera up (y+)
  • “PAGE DOWN” is used to move camera down(y-)

Fig 1. Game Running with 3 Objects

How I reach till this point:

• First of all, I added the maya exporter plugin in the solution
• Once I added the plugin project, I added the environment variables so that Maya can locate my plugins.
• Below is the image of debugging the initialization of plug-in when I loaded it through Maya

Fig 2. Maya Plugin debugging

• As this plugin is a stand-alone for Maya and not directly used by anything in the project, I had to add zero reference to Maya exporter project.
• As well as, Maya project exporter is not needed as reference for any of my projects in the engine or game.
• Maya exporter return multiple values some of which are being used by me like, position and color, whereas some of them are not being used like, normal, tangent etc.
• As for me, I am exporting every value to my human readable file, due to 2 reasons
  •  One, I am adding color values including position so it was not much issue to add other into the readable file.
  • Second, it helps me to know which things are needed by any vertex in Maya to create an object and on an edge case, if I ever want to recreate object in Maya from my file I could, as I have all the values a vertex needs to create itself in Maya
  • I know one drawback of doing this is, it would slow down the loading of object as it needs to go through every data to get useful data.
• As now we are creating and using 3D object, we had to do depth rendering, but I already did that in the 5^th Assignment and so I had everything setup.
• I was having fun doing this assignment and so I tried to stress my game by loading a super dense mesh and see how it renders in the game

Fig 3. Using a super dense object

 

• Once It rendered in game, and I came to know that I need to handle dense objects properly.

Optional Challenge:

• In this assignment the optional challenge was to add colors to the vertex and not actually creating colors using shaders.
• I thought this was the easily optional challenge there was, due to few reasons:
  • I already had setup to handle colors in my lua file so the colors that were added in Maya was easily exported to my game.
  • Rest of the part was just changing my vertex format in both game and shaders to handle color from file along with position