How well does Creo play with others (i.e. Export/Import issues)

[MingTMerciless]

I've been working with Pro-E since the bad old days when it could only be run on machines with RISC chips or on Unix systems. So I know Pro-E. Now I'm just getting used to Creo, and frankly, I like it.

But, waaaay back, it ancient times, long before PTC even offered any rendering functionality, Pro-E simply couldn't be used with 3rd party rendering sofware at all. Technically, at the time, you could supposedly out put IGES files that could then be rendered in 3rd party rendering programs, but in practice it never worked. You wound up with something that looked vaugely like a 3d wireframe - but with fur. The "fur" being countless lines that ran off to infinity in length. so unless you were heavily into 70's Funk, and a world coverd in shag carpeting, the IGES output from Pro-E was less than useful.

Fast Forward to today.

Lately I've been playing around with designing my own game spaces, which can be fun. BUT!

With nearly every piece of software out there for turning 3d wireframes into usable game spaces there's a bit of a problem.

All of them assume that you created you're original wireframes in Auto-sux-wind-cad (aka Autodesk's Autocad).

I DISPISE working in Autocad. It's like pulling weeds by hand. It's slow and tedious work.

So I was considering purchasing Creo for students ('cause my boss would hang me for playing with pet projects at work on his dime, not that I can blame him).

That way I could play around to my hearts content at home creating basic wireframes in Creo instead of Autobelch, that I'd then export to various 3rd party programs to create my little gamespaces and eventually games.

Does anyone in here have a similar hobby? (creating games from scratch?)

Has anyone in here ever tried exporting files from Creo to 3rd party rendering or gaming software?

Any advice? Experiences? Probelms?

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[TomD.inPDX]

This might date me but have you ever heard of 3D Spaces and Onlive Traveler?

I use to export WRL files and manually edit them to minimize the polygon count. Facet files work much better for 3D worlds. With Creo, you can now control the export coarseness abut very little else.

Technically, Creo uses the VRML language to a huge extent within their graphics engine. Even a highly faceted surface can look round and smooth due to the VRML definition of curvature added to the polygon. It is almost like the JPG image algorithm in 3D. It is as old as the hills but OpenGL seems to have sustained a lot of its power.

As for the other export formats, it is the same yet updated. Most people have more issues importing than exporting.

What rendering tool are you using?

[dschenken]

Blender.org Full end-to-end content creation, animation, video editing, 3D target tracking, and a coherent interface.

It has an active and vibrant user support community. Such as "How to import Minecraft worlds into Blender."

[TomD.inPDX]

I tried Blender and I found Creo to be more intuitive.

[dschenken]

I think Creo is not more intuitive, just more familiar.

I look at the results available from Blender and the tools available within it and am amazed. Blender isn't a tool for precision CAD work, but if there is need for animation, motion tracking models to video, movie editing, video compositing, physical (non-programmed) simulation of rigid, flexible, and liquid objects*, Blender is a good place to look. It offers non-linear game programming, real-time shading, and shadow casting.

The way of thinking about building models is very different, but it's better documented** and in many ways more powerful.

My favorite feature - in order to make it easier to create video tutorials Blender has a mode with on-screen mouse button status and keystrokes. Genius.

Blender 2.69 was released on October 31, 2013, so it's rather up-to-date.

*Bullet Physics within Blender is not (that I know of) a substitute for conventional numerical methods for analytical purposes.

** Not just the user documentation, but access to all the source code. How's that for letting the user in on the big secrets.

[James62]

Nice. I want to start creating my own characters using Sub-D modeling with Freestyle tool in Creo on day.

It just seems so limited compared to tools that are for example in Maya.