The Structure of a BVW World
Why is any structure necessary?
A file layout is vital to proper archiving, and also makes project organization easier.
Directory Structure
- <Root Directory> - Contains any scripts related to the world
- <RootDirectory>/Textures - Any texture maps associated with the world
- <RootDirectory>/Models - Maya Files, Egg files (if modified before bamming) and Bam files
- <RootDirectory>/Sound - All sound effects and music, in mp3 format.
Textures
- Ideally, you should use jpegs, where the width and height are a power of 2. You can use tif files, but make sure they are compressed
- Make sure your maya project is set to the root directory on your local computer. Then when you assign textures from the textures directory, they wil be refered to as ..\Textures\nameOfTex.tif
Models
- When building a model. the orientation and position are key to building fast worlds. Ideally, a models feet or base should be at the origin, facing in the positive z direction (ie forward). This may be annoying, as the model won't face towards you in maya. However, this will make the scripters job much easier.
- When building an animation (we'll call the model panda for this example):
- Once the model is finished, make sure that panda has been uvmapped by your painter
- In maya delete all history by type, freeze transformations, and save the file as panda-base.mb
- Once panda has been rigged, save the scene as panda-model.mb
- Any animations on panda should be saved as panda-AnimName.mb
- At every stage in the previous process, it would be a good idea to test models out in panda.