I sincerely hope, now that the engine is now their own, that Bethesda finally releases an official 3d model exporter.
I use NifScope for Oblivion models, but even though it is a most excellant tool, it does take some learning, and just adds in another step to get a model in game, (and a large step at that).
Beth says they support the modding community, and they have, but have sadly lacked in supporting us modelers.
Crytek/Udk, all these dev kits come with 3ds Max(my preferred choice),XSI,Maya and even Sketchup exporters!

Come on Beth... Support us modelers and give us the export tools you use to create your assets.

Here is wishing it is included (fingers crossed)

Cheers

VinnieMc

Seems I am not only one concerned as another post of same topic came up at same time as this post,,,lol

They do not own the copyright to the engine. And they did release an exporter with Morrowinds CS. I guess it is possible that they will. It will likely be for 3dsmax only however. And that IF they do.

It's possible, but in the recent years it has become standard practice to NOT release official exporters for Max and other commercial software to avoid TOS violations and such. At least that's one of the many lines given for not releasing an official import/exporter. I really don't know why to be honest, because some companies use TOS violations as a reason to not release modding tools period. But who knows for sure. If it happens, great, though I wouldn't hold my breath. I never would have thought students could get Max for free until one of them walked into my office and showed me.

Max already has a plugin courtesy of NifTools. Maya can handle objs which can be sent to Max, reposisitioned and exported as NIFs. Also Blender will most likely have an exporter pretty soon if not already. An official one would be nice, but thanks to the work of a lot of talented folks it really is not necessary.

They do not own the copyright of the engine? Did you miss all their claimig in the recent months where they said they have their own propietary new engine? It may be still an upgraded version of Gamebryo but now it's their own engine , so I see no reason why they shouln't finally release some tools for making the modder's life easier...

So far if there wheren't modders that coded the tools there would be no modding for Skyrim , but those tools are usually not refined and are quite rough couse where never done with the collaboration of the Team from Bethesda and so are unsupported...

My 2cents:

I think there should also be an exporter for cinema4d...

The "gamebryo" engine is apparently owned by some Japanese company who bought the copyrights when Gamebryo (or whatever they were called at the end) went under. Just because they changed the engine to work with their game does not mean they own the copyright. NIF, for example, is a proprietary file format which is now owned by the company that owns the engine copyright.

Anyway, like I said, they did release max tools for Morrowind. However, they would likely need the approval of the company that owns the copyrights.









I very much doubt they are going to do that. I am pretty sure Beth uses 3ds max, and therefore they wrote the tools they used for exporting and so on for 3dsmax only. I doubt they are going to take the time and spend the money on coders to re-write tools for every, or any other app(s).

Yes but they are using some 3rd party software in their engine that they do not have the copyright of.




Beth uses 3Ds Max and ZBrush for modeling. (According to an artist who worked on Skyrim during an AMA he did on Reddit)

Yes but they are not exporting anything from Zbrush into the engine. Zbrush is a sculpting app, not a modeling/animation app. Zbrush is only used to generate highpoly/high detail models to generate normal maps, and other maps. This sort of thing can be done in any sculpting app without any additional tools.

Obviously, I was just saying what software BGS uses.

Their workflow was probably something like this: Concept Art -> Base low poly mesh created in 3Ds Max -> High poly ZBrush sculpt -> Then they use the high poly model to bake a normal map -> the normal map is applied to the low poly mesh in 3Ds Max and exported to the game

they probably discard the original base low poly and create a new one by retopo'ing the new hi-poly. a lot of things change once in zbrush, and it might not even fit into the original low poly mesh anymore.

i dont know what tool they use to retopo their zbrush sculpts (if they use the built in retopo in zbrush, god bless their souls.... what a nightmare) but the naming of the trishape on Nocturnal's hood seems to suggest they do.

I'm a huge topology nerd and if I were to retopo a high-poly sculpt I'd spent 10x more time on each model I create. Maybe the BGS artists aren't as obsessed with clean topology as I am