Here is the proper link for OpenSceneGraph Max Exporter on Sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/osgmaxexp

-This is the definitive tool for me, creating content for ARive; it fluently exports maps, lights, particle systems et.c, with an OSG-preview window.

OpenSceneGraph Max Exporter is the fabulous work of Joran Jessurun and Hartmut Seichter.

The GUI is coming along fine, with lots of great input from my Visual Communication teachers, and not to forget, my invaluable friend Ove Sveumshagen (IT Advisory Specialist) who worked out how to fix my string-to-terminal problems. Cheers! Next round is on me!

Anyways, here is some test-footage of Virtual Furniture:

Content Featuring:

• Model of Scandia Junior exported directly from 3DMax9
• Point-Grey camera in action, 640×480 15FPS (far from optimal)
• 50.000 poly’s (this is overkill, to test out general performance)
• 2.4 MB total worth of textures
• Texture baking
• Environment maps (simulated reflections on the base of the chair)
• Shadow mapping (opacity map from baked texture)
• 60 FPS rendering (not visible, video recorded at 15FPS)

Bad stuff:

• Model (and whole video) appears a lot wider than it should, due to my ineptitude at video capture.
• Textures are a bit over-exposed, due to me forgetting to normalize the maps before baking them.
• Environment map not really looking any good. -Still experimenting…

Also thanks to Prof. Høgset for tipping me about the FLV-embedder for wordpress.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

A “brute force” method of testing how a user could setup occlusion in a simple manner could be:

Make a max scene where two shapes have the same coodinates.

The shapes overlap; should produce a rendering artifact.

Hypothesis:

if object A has a lower renderbin-setting than B, it’s surface will show, while B will be overlapped.

If I could set ARive to render A with a GL_COLORMASK FALSE then the object would be an occluder for the other.

This is not nearly as elegant as Sylvi’s and Julian Oliver’s soulutions, but it would make it easy for any 3dMax and OSGexporter-user to define an object in the scene as an occluder:

I could just make ARive always occlude renderbin[0] and make it an ARive imperative that a designer:

1. Only use one object for occlusion

-If a complex object, or several non-adjacent objects are needed, this could simply be an attached poly or mesh.

2. Always set that objects renderbin to 0 using OSGexporter’s OSGStateSet-helper

-In turn this could remove the need for XML-input.

After some experimenting with my app, I belive I need to load two seperate model-files into two seperate nodes, where the first model is the occluder(s) and therefore has to be loaded firstly… I think…

Testing.

Visual Studio is proving a fierce adversary both to my patience and my sleep-cycle.
Finally I have working builds of both ARTOOLKIT and OpenSceneGraph.
osgART was also finished today but I am experiencing plugin-errors when launching simple.exe.
After some fiddleing with system $PATH’s and recompiling, i get an “all good to go” response from ARTOOLKIT, but I suspect that either the GL-engine is failing to load (OSG itself) or that I have not added support for .ive to my application (banal error, must check after sleep and work).

Note to self: double-check all paths before recompiling. Write dependencies down for later, for to make an .msi installer!

EDIT: OSG cannot be misbuid, since examlpe.exe works, and initializes the engine. However, no models are loaded. Hmmm….. Paths? Plugins?

Visual Studio is hell.

The reason my references came up as missing was that I was using an old version of the GLUT libraries.

NOTE: Use glut-3.7.6-src