OFAC tut 3dsmax ogremax setup

From OpenFrag

Contents 1 Introduction 2 About Ogremax 2.1 Scene export features 2.2 Mesh export features 2.3 Materials 3 Downloading Ogremax 4 Installing the Ogremax plugin 5 Setting up the Ogremax viewer 6 Conclusion

Introduction

Welcome to this tutorial regarding the Ogremax plugin in combination with Autodesk's 3ds Max. We will make the first step on a road which will lead you to mastering Ogremax. We'll start with the basics, showing you how to setup Ogremax properly.

Please note that the Ogremax plugin is heavily maintained, this means that some features might be a little different (naming schemes, options) than shown in the tutorials. The basics should still remain the same, so in the end it shouldn't cause major problems.

About Ogremax

OgreMax is a collection of tools for Ogre 3D and 3DS Max developed by Derek Nedelman.
It includes a 3DS Max 8/9/2008 exporter, a scene viewer, 13 sample scenes, and documentation.

Scene export features Nodes Cameras Lights Entities Meshes Custom user data Track/look targets Environment Sky box/dome/plane Environment range Fog Ambient color Shadow settings Billboard sets Planes Externals Terrain Particle systems Scene node animation Note tracks Models..and more!

Mesh export features Pose animation (Morpher modifier) Morph animation Skeleton animation (Skin and Physique modifiers) Vertex colors Normals Texture coordinates Level-of-detail generation XML and binary formats...and more!

Materials Custom material type Full Ogre material support, including shader programs and render textures.

Screenshots:

Downloading Ogremax

The Ogremax plugin can be obtained from the official website: www.ogremax.com.

This tutorial was written with OgreMax version 1.5.19, but you should always make sure you have the newest release.

Installing the Ogremax plugin

Once you downloaded the zipfile you can install the 3ds Max plugin. The zip file has the following structure:

• Automatic installation
  • Open the OgreMaxSceneExporter folder and run OgreMaxSceneExporterInstaller.exe. This setup should be self-explanatory.
• Manual installation
  • Open the OgreMaxSceneExporter folder and get the right version of OgreMaxSceneExporter.gup (In the tutorials we use 1.4.x Max9) and put it in: .\3ds max 9\plugins
• Copy the cg.dll to your 3DS Max installation directory if the file doesn't already exist.
  
• If there are any startup problems, you may need to install the Visual C++ runtimes and a version of the runtimes dated October 2006 or later. Older DirectX versions will not work.
• Note: A few OgreMax users reported a startup problem even though had they necessary runtimes on their system. The problem was solved by installing the newest DirectX runtimes (newer than October 2006, even though OgreMax was developed using the DirectX from October 2006)
• You should see now an extra entry in your menu:

We have succeeded installing the plugin.

Setting up the Ogremax viewer

The easiest way to setup the viewer is to extract the folder OgreMaxViewer from the zipfile directly into your C:\. You can put it anywhere else, just make sure the path doesn't contain spaces. So for example, don't use: c:\Program Files\OgreMaxViewer\.

• Once we have extracted this folder, we can begin setting up the viewer for easy use further along the road. Head over to C:\OgreMaxViewer\Samples and you'll see a bunch of BAT files there. Create a new one with the following code:

cd ../Projects/VisualStudio
OgreMaxViewer ../../Media/scenes/Openfrag/scene.scene

• Save this as openfrag.bat
• Navigate to C:\OgreMaxViewer\Media\scenes and create a new folder called Openfrag

This is what it should look like in the end:

Conclusion

That's it for now! We have properly setup our tools in order to work with Ogremax. Now head over to #2 Creating a basic scene to start working with this wonderful piece of software.
Good luck!