Nice review at creative mac, apologies if this has already been posted.
http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=82608
Although I just have to point out, only because it’s so often and so consistent, that “it’s” = “it is” or “it has”, no exceptions. “Its” is like “his” or “hers”…note the lack of apostrophe. Kind of hard to read when I was cringing every few lines, sorry. 
–Eric
Sorry Eric, those are my boo-boo’s. I’m afraid I didn’t do as good a job editing as I should have 
Paul aka BigK
boo-boos 
Ill just never learn. Oops, I mean, “I’ll just never learn”. :lol:
Interesting review. It’s nice to find a solution that gets your projects moving!
I’m curious, are any of the other engines you tried well-known ones? Torque etc.?
Yes, I’ve used quite a few. Most notable include: Torque, Blender Game Engine, Shockwave (I’ve been using Director for over a decade), Quest3D, Deep Creator, Anark, and I’ve recently played with Beyond Virtual and Virtools.
Interesting review … although it seems to end a bit prematurely. It kind of calls for a more in-depth followup.
Now to beat my dead horse
I’ve used a huge number of game engines and Unity seems to me to be the best overall tool by far.
However, I think Unity has one important (almost crippling) problem – lack of support for common file types. (Note, I still think it’s the best tool overall.)
It doesn’t help that the Mac 3D market has been fairly slow to make the move to Intel (very odd given how apparently cross-platform all their code-bases are; why on Earth isn’t Lightwave or Maya available native for Intel yet?). As a prospective Unity developer I have a choice of Cinema 4D R10 – which doesn’t currently export to Unity properly, Maya – which won’t run on my main dev machine (Intel) or my old dev machine (G4), Lightwave – which will run under emulation but isn’t fully supported, or a PC-based solution which will also not be fully-supported.
Assuming I wanted to tool up a small dev studio right now, I can’t buy a Mac that runs the current version of Maya, which is the “golden path” for Unity content development. This rather dire situation isn’t OTEE’s fault, but it’s unfortunate nonetheless.
While Unity may be good enough to justify using a Mac for development, this doesn’t mean that your artists will necessarily use Mac software.
I hope that in the long term collada support and/or some other open file format will eliminate this issue. I assume that Unity went the FBX route because it represented a quick win, but ultimately FBX does not seem like the best way to do unless Autodesk open sources the tools or at least documents it.
It seems very similar to the route taken by Macromedia with Director’s 3D engine, which required every 3D tool vendor to implement export to Shockwave. Not one of the exporters ever worked very well and as a consequence Director 3D has remained pretty marginal despite the still large Director user base (I myself have been using Director since it was called Macromind Videoworks).
There are a couple of quite impressive, easy-to-use, and (relatively) cheap PC game dev tools (3d game studio, blitz3d, and some more expensive tools whose names I forget) out there but they only allow targeting PC/MS platforms. Every one I’ve seen has far better file support than Unity.
Possible quick wins include:
Support for textured .objs
Support for .X files (OK that’s asking a lot)
Support for .md2 and .md3 files
Support for VRML files (ignore primitives; just meshes)
Providing a Unity file format that is well documented and has a text version (e.g. the way .3DMF could have a binary or text representation) which it would be fairly easy to target using a scripting language.
If you compare Unity to Blitz3d (for example), the latter does all of the above except for VRML support and having a non-binary version of its documented file format.
Just for the record I ran both Maya and Lightwave on a 1ghz G4 powerbook for years. I had no problem using Maya (up to v7) for all my viz work on that hardware. And Lightwave has always run well on low end powermacs and laptops.
cheers.
We run Maya on many Intel macs here at SG - on the PC side, Max exports FBX just fine
It seems very similar to the route taken by Macromedia with Director’s 3D engine, which required every 3D tool vendor to implement export to Shockwave. Not one of the exporters ever worked very well and as a consequence Director 3D has remained pretty marginal despite the still large Director user base (I myself have been using Director since it was called Macromind Videoworks).
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I just want to add that the 3dsmax export plugin is okay for director as it doesn’t include all the junk which you get out from other exporters like maya for instance. Secondly if you’ve bought plasma you were also able to export the physics side defined in the modeller which worked pretty well for my projects.
Obviously they could have done better but on the other side these routes work.
We do support both FBX and Collada. It’s just that FBX tools seem to be more mature at the moment; but we also hope that Collada will only improve over time.
Try with Collada (.dae). That’s one open, XML-based, and widely supported format.
d.
Try with Collada (.dae). That’s one open, XML-based, and widely supported format.
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And also so a bloated format.
Cinema 4D 10’s FBX exporter works fine, you just have to export to FBX manually. With 1.6 - coming this week - the native importer will also work with Cinema 4D 10.
If you look at all big modelling tools available on the mac:
- Maya - native importer
- Cinema 4D - native importer
- Lightwave - fbx exporter
- Cheetah 3D - native importer
- Modo - fbx exporter
- motion builder - fbx exporter
With the first three you can export character animation perfectly fine. They all work on intel. Maya is not universal binary, but it runs perfectly fine through rosetta.
So if you have money to buy a 3D modelling animation package on the mac, There are plenty of options you can choose from. They all work on intel ppc machines. It’s simply a matter of choosing one and buying it.
There is of course blender. We have switched to using collada for the blender native importer with 1.5. In the hope that the exporter would have support for character animation export by now. We actually did try to fund the collada blender development so that animation export could be in 1.6. But unfortunately the guy was not able to do it in time. So this will be left for another release.
On the pc there are a bunch more modelers animators which Unity can import:
- 3ds max
- milkshape
- xsi
- Maya
- Cinema 4D
- Lightwave
So thats 4 animation modelling tools on the mac. And 7 on the PC.
The real question is which tool would you like to see supported as having an animation export path which Unity can’t import from right now?
lightwave’s ub is in beta right now. fwiw, they have stated on their forums that once the ub is released, some sort of support for unity (and others) is on their radar. native support certainly would be a welcome convenience but in the meantime fbx works fine. don’t really know what they have planned though.
[edit: just looked back at exactly what newtek wrote about it and it wasn’t as strong as i remembered it. so i edited the above to be a little less certain of what they have in mind. i know their Mac guy knows we’d like unity support. here’s to hoping…]
Thank you for the feedback. A followup is planned, but it probably won’t go too much more in depth than what you see in my other articles. The reasons are: a) online magazines (my target publishers) prefer short, to the point articles, and b) “in depth” reviews tend to lean towards one genre of game development and I wanted this article to be more generalized. Of course if my publishers ask for an “in depth followup” I’ll be more than happy to oblige.
Cheap? Yes. Impressive? Maybe. Easy to use? Hmm… I suppose that depends on your game development background. It’s my opinion (based on my own experience and from what I’ve read on the game dev forums) that a major obstacle for many beginning game developers is the inability to write code, and in particular, C++. Of the two you’ve listed I’ve only tried 3D Game Studio, and 3DGS uses their own “flavor” of C, which IMHO makes it not particularly easy to use.
Of the engines that I used that didn’t require programming in C (a partial list is in my earlier post), none came close to Unity’s overall ease of use, speed of development and stability (with extra emphasis on stability!).
I personally think that OTEE’s decision to support FBX and Collada will, in the long run, be the right one. But unfortunately at present, there are still a few “gaps” in media support. Most noteably is the lack of a good, inexpensive way to get animated 3D characters into Unity. Blender would be the best solution for this, IMHO, and I commend OTEE for their efforts to “motivate” the Collada Blender developer to finish his plugin. Hopefully that short coming will be short lived.
Well, you can’t say it this easily but the most used modellers/3d packages for games (very generalised) are still 3dsMax and Softimage. Softimage XSI Foundation is just a steal for it’s price.
Professionals might draw their displacement maps in zBrush or other tools but it mostly lands back in one of these two apps. Both are sadly not available on OSX but that’s what’s beeing used by a larger number of developers as far as i know.
Just for the record: ZBrush is available on OSX we use it every day at SG to do characters…
I never said that zBrush isn’t available on OSX. If you reread my posting then you will notice that i said “both” which is regarding to 3dsmax and softimage.
However a downside of zBrush for some people might be that you don’t get a crosslicence like you do for modo. But that’s a total different story…