A lot has happened since my last post, I’ve been working on the new exporter every day. I have come a long way, and soon it’ll be ready for beta release.

As I wrote in my previous post here I’m rewriting everything in c++, and now I have these things mostly ready.

You can download a zipped sample project that you can load into maratis (the scene these screenshots are taken from). If you then select some of the shapes, go to their ‘properties’ you can apply different animations that are defined.

Download the project files here testproject

Animation modifier
you can now add as many animation modifiers as you want, each of the has a ‘start, end’ range and a name for the animation. So if you have a character with walk\run\jump cycle you just add 3 modifiers, with their respective settings and it will export to maratis.

Physics modifier
You can add physics to any mesh, and specify the settings, maratis will then load the shape withe the selected settings applied.

Shader
With the shader you set maps for the different slots, each slots means something (I will describe this better then in the screenshot). Texunit1 means diffuse map and so on. I’m going to add the missing GUI items as well (specular color and such things).

Max scene:

Result (with some animation applied):

(The reason why this seems a bit more dim then in 3dsmax is because the specular parameter is not done yet)

Around 5 years ago I found the game engine ‘Maratis’, I really liked it.
It’s easy to use, nice clean editor, nice LUA language support (which I’m used to from maxscript).
Very good for prototyping and creating games fast.

Back then I then created a exporter for 3dsmax for it, and posted a video of it here:

I then moved on to other projects.

But recent comments on the video about the exporter got me back to developing on it again, and I have now spent around two days upgrading the exporter to 3dsmax 2018, I have also rewritten most of it from maxscript to c++, so now the exporter GUI, animation modifier and physics modifier is rewritten as c++ plugins.
The last missing piece now is the shader (which will be done next).

The reason why I rewrite it in c++ is because I want to sell this plugin for a fair price, and I want the speed of c++, I spend a considerable amount of time developing tools like this, so getting something in return would be fair I think, the plugin will not be expensive, but fair.

Currently supported features:

• All mesh types.
• Camera (also target camera).
•  Skin\bone animation. (can be animated with IK and anything else)
• Spot \ omni light.
• Physics parameters.
• Animation parameters (animation name, length, start\stop time etc).
• Full scene export.
• Single\multiple mesh object export.

I’m now fixing the missing parts and getting it ready for release.

And worth a mention – if you edit a object in the maratis scene, then this is not updated back in 3dsmax. But that is how it is in most exporter scenarios, you set up the game level as want it, export, then continue in your game editor. You can however export single (or multiple) mesh only objects, then you can add these in your maratis scene as you go.
I might later look into a ‘import’ feature, that reads your maratis scene file and then updates the objects in max based on what you have done in maratis,
this will make a two-way connection, but that has to be determined later.

I hope to have the plugin ready for release in about a week, I need to fix the remaining shader stuff first.
Then I will also create a new video tutorial, and proper documentation (pdf).

Screenshot of maratis with a loaded scene exported with the new c++ exporter.