Very good article, I liked it. personally I really like Blender, although I never used trueSpace; I’ll give it a shot later today if I can manage. Blender does take a bit getting used to, but once you learn how things work under the hood, you understand why everything is so far apart, it’s part of the “blender philosophy” to store textures separate from the materials to allow multiple use of them. One thing I’m really missing though is a Processor for Blender Models so I can use them and their animations in XNA (Does anyone know where I can find one?)

This blog is going on my Bookmark list.

~moonshadow

Hey thanks for your reply, I’d love to get a hold on Maya unfortunately the only free version is the Personal Learning Edition, which can’t export to any (usefull) format for use with XNA (or any other 3D app for that matter). I do love Maya though!

Currently I mostly use Blender though, you should check my most recent article series on ziggyware.com I think it is titled ‘Creating Animated Textured Models for XNA: part2 trueSpace’ at http://www.ziggyware.com/readarticle.php?article_id=216 which goes more in depth about trueSpace7.6 and was created when I understood trueSpace allot better than a few months ago when this article was written. (Part 1 was about Blender if you where wondering).

Good Luck!

Haha, and don’t worry I like long replies, that means we have things to think about.

well if not native to english you did really well then, it wasn’t that bad,anyway. although ‘what’ does have a ‘h’ in it, here in the south (US) that don’t matter anyway!

the article is good and of a good subject matter, and that’s what matters. getting models in any engine, animated, and making them functional has always been a major hurdle in game creation.

between the pricing, licensing, and steep learning curve that 3d modeling programs have, it’s amazing we have any games at all.

i’m thinking of delving into blender for now, possibly mixing it up with truespace until i can see where xsi mod tool goes later on. i see where garagegames might be including xsi mod tool pro in their next release. it’s not free but it may be reasonable, we’ll just have to wait and see.

you’ll find online help and articles on getting animations going with xna game studio express2 now. but the xsi mod tool is supposed to load straight into game studio express with the release of game studio 3. not sure about details exactly yet. but with xna game studio premium membership, one is supposed to have access to garagegames’ engine and mix that with xsi’s mod tool and loosen some of the licensing restrictions and it’d be on then.

wow, sorry for the long reply. gl to u and later

Thanks for commenting. Unfortunately being able to use model animations in XNA requires you to make your own content processor, thats quite allot of work I haven’t gotten around to yet. If I get around to it, I’ll make sure to make a new article. (Check the RSS to stay updated).

As for the spellcheck, it all ran trough Word2003’s Spellcheck, thought it was all ok. As you might have noticed I’m not a native English speaker so that makes it a bit more difficult. I’ll try to check my articles better.

Btw wat spelling errors did you find?

blender isn’t user-friendly at all, and truespace gets frustrating after while too. don’t let the pretty buttons fool you. i wish there were some other alternatives as well, ie for commercial release that is.

i mainly wanted to post to see if anyone has done animations in either program and what the results were.

i would like to see your article go deeper in depth on this subject tho. possibly covering animation, effects, shaders and how they do in xna, the more – the better.

btw- spellcheck would help when actually publishing the article good luck

I know Blender has allot of potential but that wasn’t the purpose of this article. Blender is just less accessible so for programmers it might be better to just use trueSpace, create a model quickly and then let real artist create high poly models.

but I will try the uv-unwrap, and if it works out I’ll post a new article telling about that.