Be Gone Wireframe – Hello Space Cruiser!

Today I spent time on my scene mechanics and imported a new space ship model to replace the test ring place-holder that I was using for the autonomous steering behaviour programming.  It served it’s purpose by indicating the steering, velocity and normal vectors but I know those around me were wanting to see a spiffy model. Anyway I found a rather nice free 3DS model by Mace24de (thanks buddy) on TurboSquid. Loading this into Max it was just a case of giving it a good paint job via Lumonix Shader FX via an interactive pipeline building process. Gotta love Shader FX. 

As you recall in a previous post, Shader FX is a must have for the generation of HLSL GPU shaders in the form of .FX files for use in the likes of XNA.  I’ll just do something fairly simple for now though – a diffuse texture map with a touch of glossiness should be a good start.  Later I’ll plonk in a normal map to make it more interesting.  Here’s a shot of Shader FX in 3DS Max.

…now let’s apply that to our model via Tools/Apply to Selection in Shader FX:

That’s more like it. Now let’s export the shader for XNA. In Shader FX choose File/Export FX…

Select XNA from the appearing dialog.  Make sure you pick Y-Up too – that is a requirement for XNA.

Remember that the XNA shader must be a different filename to the one being used in 3DSMax.  I like to merely give the XNA files a “XNA” suffix.  A no brainer

…export your model. Make sure just your model is selected, no lights/cameras/etc. please unless your pipeline can handle that. Choose File/Export/Export Selected in 3DSMax:

Export as a FBX using Autodesk’s FBX export tool (its a free download from their site). My settings is pretty much the defaults except I’ve deselected cameras, animations etc. for now as I can’t handle them anyway). We don’t want cameras or lights because we’ll be doing that in game.

Eventually this gets into my game using my custom content importer pipeline for FBX that reattaches textures, FX etc. to achieve the following result. I only have to include the .FBX file in my Visual Studio project – there is no need to directly specify the FX, textures or other files because my custom pipeline finds them by reading the info in the original FBX file.  This is handy because I can leave shared art on a different drive and use it in other projects.  Yippee!

Here we are just to the side:

 

Coming in for the kill!

 

From above: