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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Shame about the 3D format supports. :(

They do seem to have some Alembic support: they ship the libraries as part of the engine download, in their 3rdParty folder.

Alembic is an open 3D file format supported by pretty much all the major 3D modellers these days - including Blender, Modo, Houdini, Cinema4D and plenty of others besides the Autodesk tools.

Oh, really? Now THAT is interesting.

Neither Unity nor Unreal currently support Alembic - this is the first indication I've had that the Amazon engine might have some features the others don't.

Thanks!

Seems like they could throw in Assimp[1] and have most of the common formats out-of-the-box.

[1] https://github.com/assimp/assimp

I've never been able to get Assimp to successfully load anything other than .obj format models, despite what they claim in their docs. Last time I tried was about two years ago though, so maybe it's improved since then.

I've used the .NET wrapper to load up quite a few different model formats. Sometimes it takes a little fiddling to get the right set of flags, because it seems like every model is setup just a little differently...

Huh, that's a very nice library I'd not seen before! Thanks.

Yea, which is a shame for them, as lots of the smaller shops starting out and actually deciding which game engine to use are likely to be starting with something like Blender. I don't even think 3DS Max exists anymore? Isn't it just Maya now?

3DS Max definitely exists. Autodesk is still supporting them, and not as a 'oh this is just an auxiliary side project'. The breakdown (oversimplified) is Maya is more for complicated models used in animation/CGI (MEL scripting is their 'killer' tool that puts it ahead of Max), while things like architectural and game models are mostly done in 3DS Max (but theres a lot of overlay between the two, i.e., I've seen tons of work done in game modelling on Maya LT).

Speaking of which, Maya LT is not that badly priced for what you get - I have no animation ability but I've seen my friends do some incredible things with it. If you're artistically inclined, have a play. Regardless, the lack of Blender support makes me sad.

All game studios I have worked at have used Maya. I do know of some that use Max but it's definitely not the case that Maya is only used outside of games.

As a side note, Maya added Python as a scripting language a while back. You can also write plugins in C++, which can be a nice way to write custom exporter code sharing engine code files for file formats and such.

Hmm, interesting question whether the exporter supports Maya LT. I'd guess it does, and it's cheap (ish).

3dsmax definitely still exist, although I wish Autodesk learned cloud pricing from Adobe because 240€ a month just for 3dsmax is way way too much, especially compared with Creative Cloud which is barely 60€ yet contains almost all their softwares.

Yup, Max still exists. I have it open on my desktop right now :)

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