Hey devs, can you please consider an FBX pipeline for your in game models? It kills me that it is tied to Maya. I am not a fan of Autodesk (either professionally or privately, and I don't want to have a debate about it) products for various reasons. I would love to make new models for the game using an FBX pipeline of some sort. If the export is tied to some kind of format it must be in could that export be done in something like Blender? I mean do you need support for that? I have written plugins for Blender in the past if I had the right data I could certainly look at writing an exporter for Blender.

Anyway, if it could be done with a standard FBX pipeline and perhaps an exporter or even a conversion program using a standardized skeleton I think a lot more people would be into modding unique characters. I dunno, perhaps the new custom character system will eclipse this need.

I hate Maya, Just gonna say that to start.
Maya makes me want to crawl into a ball and cry sometimes

Anyway i don't know how much version 4 will change but i can guess alot.
So yea this might be pointless.

Depending on what you want to add to the game you can do it all in blender and import it into Maya as the final step (like i do)

What im hoping for is a editor for the game where you can just import models and build the scene in there and leave maya alone, In the corner, Nice and quiet (i know i know but i can dream, Unless its gonna happen then im happy )

Yup, Maya kinda sucks. I guess it's a great tool if you learned it from the start in 1995 and you got used to it. But for me it was like 3 days of "how the fuck do I do <insert easy thing here>" and I actually gave up on it cause it seemed like a huge time sink to learn. Don't get me wrong, 3d modelling software usually has a steep learning curve, but in comparison it seems really bad.

Also it costs money, alot of it. Which is kind of a problem if you need it to mod a game.

Edit: Filemaker basically converts .ma (maya ascii) to .obj (not wavefront obj, xsp obj) Afaik .ma is a documented format. So in theory one could write a blender to .ma export plugin. I guess it's probably a ton of work though and it's very possible that filemaker only implements a subset of the .ma features

It is free if you are a student

2 Hours trying to find the skin menu to do animations, Googled high and low and almost went insane.
Finally found it "dropdown box top left" changes the top shelf thing and the skin menu appeared.
Never been so angry in my life...

Yeah it's funny, google doesn't like Maya either.

It is not really the products from Autodesk I don't like. It is their draconian licensing that is over and above what other companies do. I have used Autocad in my professional life and love it. However, their practices of enforcing their license are over the top. I use other drafting software for my pro life now that I run my own company. I don't really have any opinion on Maya itself. I cut my teeth on Blender and can do pretty much anything I want with it.

The reason I say use FBX (which I think is an Autodesk format they created for interoperability) is because everything pretty much supports it now and it delivers where some of the other standards have failed. If there were a stand alone converter that you feed in a file and it output the correct thing that would be the best. Just have that converter read FBX or something similar. No, don't use DAE. It has issues in interoperability. It is a failed interchange format in my opinion.

Heck, I would even write it if someone could tell me the important bits. My fear is that exporting from Maya to FBX is that it loses too much info to work right. That is one of the problems with proprietary formats. I think blend files have similar issues if the data is not purely polygons.

@riftporn,
You are right in that the ma ASCII format is documented:
http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2011help/index.html?url=./files/Maya_ASCII_file_format_Maya_ASCII_file_format.htm,topicNumber=d0e702063

Maybe I can take a closer look. Didn't realize the ma format was open like that. I was under the assumption it was a binary blob. DOH!

Well, I know filemaker will convert polygons, bones and textures. There is alot of stuff that can be saved into an .ma file that makes filemaker burp. So maybe the subset of things you'd need to implement is small enough to be not a monster task. I'm actually amazed there isn't a blender -> .ma converter available.

Not wanting to hijack this thread, but as knowledgeable people are here, might I ask a question?
I come from an industrial design / CAD / CAM side and use Solidworks for design. It's a great software really but the issue I have when creating things like toys for XSP is that the only export that Maya can import is STL/OBJ. Upon import in Maya there is no normals etc so the STL needs to be really high poly to look good in game.
Does somebody know if it's possible to EASILY get the normals back so a rather low poly object will look smooth in the game?

I could probably design 20 sex toys a day in solidworks no problem if I had a way to get it working low poly in Maya / someone could do that for me.