What I did last summer and updated XSI DTS exporter

It's been a while...

since my last .plan/blog here on Garage Games. I've been in semi lurker mode for the last year, barely having the time to do much of anything short of work and sleep. Now that I actually have some spare time I figure its about time for an update.

This past Summer my wife and I decided we needed to take some time off work and decided to take a road trip from Wisconsin (actually only about 25 miles east of St. Paul, MN on the Wisconsin and Minnesota border.) to California and back. As luck would have it about a week after we made our plans, and the first day I had my convertible out of storage, I got sideswiped on my way home from Woodbury, MN and nearly totaled my car. It took almost a month for the repairs to be completed. I ended up getting my car back from the body shop 4 days before we left on our trip.

The farthest West I had driven up to this point was from Wisconsin to Yellowstone National park and back in 2004, this new trip was going to be a very long drive to say the least. This would also be my first trip relying mostly on GPS instead of paper maps and I can honestly say that on any kind of long distance trip GPS is a god send. It worked flawlessly the entire trip and helped us find everything we needed along the way, from helping us plan how far we could safely make it each day to effortlessly finding our way around unfamiliar cities without wasting time driving in circles or having to pull over to look at maps. It added almost a video game like feel to our vacation!


Highlights from the trip include:

Gas that was almost /gallon, Wall Drug, Glacier National Park, A Petrified Forest, Seattle, The Space Needle,
Mt. Renier, Mt. Saint Helens, The Washington and Oregon Coasts, Garage Games HQ, Redwood National Park,
The Avenue of Giants, US Coastal Highway 1, Napa Valley, The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, The Winchester House,
Lake Taho, Donner Pass, Reno, The Great Salt Flats, Saltlake City, Denver Colorado, The Stanley Hotel and Cheyenne Wyoming.

The rest of Nebraska and Iowa were pretty much just a blur as at that point we were pretty much just looking forward to being home again.

It was an awesome trip and seeing the transitions from plains, to forest, to desert to mountains from the Midwest to the West Coast and back was well worth the effort. The only problem was that 2 and a half weeks was just not enough time to see everything that there was to see. Guess that just means we'll have to do it again at some point. :)


XSI DTS Exporter

For those that are interested, about a month and a half ago, Mike Jarosch and I picked up where we left off with the XSI DTS Exporter and have been working on adding in the remaining features and fixing some bugs that were causing problems with exported animations. I am happy to say that the XSI exporter is now feature complete. The only exception Morph Animation.

The updated exporter is available from this forum thread

The XSI exporter now supports:

• Static Meshes
• Skeletal Animation
• Node/Object Animation
• IFL Animation
• DSQ Export
• Billboard
• Billboard-z
• Auto Billboards
• Manual Detail Levels (including using the XSI poly reduction operator)
• Auto Detail Level Generation (via decimation in the exporter)
• Triggers
• Visibility Animation
• Collision
• TwoSided Materials
• Transparent Materials
• Additive Transparent Materials
• Subtractive Transparent Materials
• Self Illuminated Materials
• Environment Mapping

As the forum post mentions, the XSI exporter is compatible with XSI 6.x and up and the latest version of XSI ModTool which is free for non-commercial use.


For the past 2 weeks I have also been testing the use of the built in XSI character tools to rig, animate with and then export to DTS. They work very well, the only change required when using a biped rig is that the exporter doesn't currently like the XSI Model container. In XSI each Model container is considered a new scene root, because of this you just need to move your rig out of its model container to the regular scene root. Then add your detail markers and bounds and it will export perfectly. I will probably add a feature that will let you choose which scene root that you would like to export which will make the exporter a bit more flexible.

I am now onto the detail work and polish stage. Testing all of the features, writing the exporter UI, writing tutorials & documentation and converting various Torque assets from 3ds Max to XSI and XSI Modtool formats. For anyone working with the exporter please feel free to post your questions, problems and complaints in the Artist Forums.

Lastly, I am looking for someone that has a 64bit development environment to do a 64bit compile of the exporter. If you have the needed tools and are interested in the task let me know.