xfile importing to godot

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TinSoldier

Coming from another engine that used MS d3d xfiles for 3dmodels, i have hundreds if not a thousand or more 3dmodels created in 3dsmax and exported using pandas xfile exporter. I cant find any reference to xfiles other than FBX.. . The issue is,.

I have no desire to convert many of these files to some other format just to import into godot, I NEED xfile importing to avoid much work and to avoid duplicating resources.

Any info or how to do this would be greatly appreciated.

cybereality

Well Godot AFAIK does not support .x models, so you will need to do some manual work to get them into the engine.

Probably the easiest thing would be to use ASSIMP, which can convert between almost any popular 3D format. You can run it from the command line with batch scripts to convert all the files at once. https://github.com/assimp/assimp

You can also import to Blender and then export to glTF, but obviously if you have 100's of models this would take a long time.

You can also write an .x importer yourself, though I wonder if this will be worth it when ASSIMP has already done the work and you can simply use that.

TwistedTwigleg

I thought ASSIMP was fully integrated into Godot for the FBX importer, but it looks like the Godot source code may only use just the FBX parts of it.

I did some looking and it looks like this is the last commit/state of the GitHub source with Assimp included as a module and with 3rd party source. It may be possible to copy the code in modules/assimp and thirdparty/assimp and then compile Godot 3.x, which may allow for .x support more easily, but I'm not sure how difficult it would be.

TinSoldier

@TwistedTwigleg I'm learning godot here and you are talking about recompiling the engine source code ! UMMMM.

@cybereality assimp sounds good but it still is a conversion process, which is what i'm trying to avoid, "duplicating resources." Pluss if i want do conversions i can do many other format exports from 3dsmax.

IMO a xfile importer seems to be whats required here, exporting isn't needed for my use. Writing one myself..... not likely.

No xfile support is giving second thoughts about using godot, and looking more at unity..

cybereality

Even Microsoft doesn't support .x files after DirectX9, they dropped support like 10 years ago. It's a dead format and of limited use for anyone not working with old versions of DirectX. So I doubt anyone would want to invest any time in this (for example to have a native importer). But ASSIMP should work, and you can get the assets into a modern format like glTF or FBX, which will be better in the long run.

TwistedTwigleg

@TinSoldier said: @TwistedTwigleg I'm learning godot here and you are talking about recompiling the engine source code ! UMMMM.

Compiling the engine isn't too difficult and the documentation is pretty good on showing how to do it. I was recommending it because it would, potentially, be an easier way to get the files into Godot without needing to convert, so long as ASSIMP supports it natively. That said though, looking through the code it may not be a simple change and if you are not familiar with Godot's source code, it isn't something I'd recommend trying right off.

Converting the assets is probably the easiest way to use the .x files. It also has the advantage of making it where you can more easily use other 3D creation software if you need to make tweaks or adjustments. It is probably possible to batch convert them, so you can just tell a program where the files are and leave it running for a bit while it converts everything for you.

Calinou

Godot no longer uses Assimp – instead, Assimp's FBX support code was extracted and significantly rewritten for use in Godot.

There was a short time during 3.2 development while Assimp was used directly (which allowed you to import any format supported by Assimp). However, this approach was not kept, not even in 3.2.