I am completely new in 3D programming on the iPhone, and I would like to ask for hints about the organization of work between designers and programmers on this platform. Most of all: which tools, libraries, or plugins work best on both sides.
Although I consider the issue as a search for general Best Practice Recommendations I would like to find a solution for my current situation, which I describe below.
I have already done some research and found the following libraries:
I checked the fashion designers or plugins for them, giving output formats read by these tools:
Unfortunately, I still do not have a clear vision of how to combine any of these tools to make desinger work in the application. I’m looking for a way to get it as much as possible: models, lights, scenes, textures, maybe some simple animations (but rather, not like a physics game), but I still haven’t received anything.
And here is my situation: I would like to find the right path for representing several (but rather complex) models from the same scene. Designers mainly use 3DS Max 9, sometimes 10 (partially prevents the use of PVRGeoPOD) and are rather reluctant to switch to something else, but if there is no other choice, I suppose it is possible.
The basic rule that I have already found in some places, “use Wavefront OBJ” does not always work. I have no acceptable results with production files, actually. The only thing that worked was just examples. Some of my models imported incomplete ones, sometimes exporters hung or generated huge files that were not very useful on the iPhone, sometimes including textures (with GL_TEXTURE_2D) just crashed the application.
I know that this may be a problem with models that are too complex or my mistakes arising from inexperience, but I can’t find guidelines for this process should simplify the collaboration with designers.
I am even ready to write some things from scratch in pure OpenGL-ES, if necessary, but I would like to avoid what I should avoid and get the most out of model files. Best would be the effect that I saw on some SIO2 tutorials: export, assembly, and transition. But at this moment I only have “import, wrong”, “import”, where are the textures? "," import, which almost looks good, export, hang ", etc. on ...
Is it really upsetting, or am I just missing something obvious? Can someone share their experience in this area and tell me what software they use to “create things”?