PMD format

[Brightgalrs]

How exactly do you import a .pmd file, and export into it? I've read through the Wiki, but all I can find is a reference to "pmdexp" tool, which I can not find.

So where is this pmdexp tool, and if that only exports to pmd, how do I import to 3ds max?

[Ykkrosh]

Originally, the game just understood .pmd files (a custom file format) and we had a custom 3ds Max exporter tool (should be in source/tools/pmdexp/ but it requires a specific old version of the 3ds Max SDK). Then we switched to Collada (.dae files) as the main input format, using standard exporter tools for whatever 3d programs people fancy using, so that's what should be provided in SVN, and the game automatically converts and caches as .pmd (since that's a much more efficient format to load).

There are standard importer tools for Collada, so that's generally quite straightforward. New meshes should all be .dae files, but we haven't converted all the old ones so they're still just .pmd, and there's no existing tool to import the .pmds into editing programs. The file format is reasonably simple, so it shouldn't be too hard to write one, but we haven't needed it so far.

[feneur]

Hmm, I'm not even sure we still use PMD since we've started to use COLLADA, I'm not too sure about all the technical things though, so perhaps I'm wrong. If we're still using it I think it's only internal to Pyrogenesis and automatically exported once the game loads the file. I hope someone else has got more info on it though, and I'm sure there are places in the documentation that could use some updating in either case.

EDIT: Doh, Philip answered before I did :) And he said things more eloquently and all as well Not too surprising though as he's the one with the technical knowledge.

[Brightgalrs]

Ironically, I thought the PMD was the new format. Lol

Thanks for the help, but still this is a bit annoying. Almost all of the building meshes are uneditable.