Once of the most overbearing and demanding projects for the 2 years prior to the V4.1 release has been our implementation of the best skeleton & mesh skinning conversion system amongst Maya, 3ds max, XSI and DirectX (all bi-directional between any of these named packages). Skinning is also supported coming in from Kaydara FBX file format. This has prompted the development of our "Arctic" toolkit which handles the proper bi-directional conversion of the skinned meshes and skeletons, as well as a bevy of important processing functionality such as re-alignment of Maya bones which coming into 3ds max, removal of off-axis scaling from Bipeds coming out of 3ds max (including resampling all the animation curves), finding a "proper" bind pose coming out of Maya (there tends to be 3 but more than a few customer files are 'broken'), moving the skeleton hierarchy out of the mesh hierarchy when going from 3ds max to DirectX, fixing invalid skinning weights coming out of various 3D packages, equating one program's skinning system with another (everyone does it just a tad bit different than the others), etc.

This is a polygon reduction system written by Okino over a period of several years and has not been licensed from a third party. It is includes in every copy of v4 Okino software and it is not an expensive add-on module as with offerings from other companies.

The final released version in V4.x software is the culmination on two major rewrites and several beta field tests. The second rewrite, in particular, added full support for the modern reduction concept of "wedges" which allows for vertex normals, vertex colors and vertex uv texture coordinates to be taken into account when collapsing vertices (and thus areas with high change in curvature, color or texture coordinates will not be overly reduced).

The polygon reduction system is available to those v3.5 customers who were our beta site customers starting no earlier than January 2002.

The third generation PolyTrans-for-MAX native plug-in system ships only with PolyTrans/NuGraf v4.x, or via a paid upgrade to V4.x for older customers. This, and its mirror twin PolyTrans-for-Maya, are our two most requested plug-in systems. The third generation MAX plug-in system is a significant development for our production shop users, encompassing our new Arctic toolkit that allows for bi-directional conversion of mesh skinning (Character Studio and SkinMod), procedural and keyframe animation controllers, full hierarchy support, extensive user controllable options, skeleton and bones conversion (with proper re-orientation of Maya skeletons to 3ds max X-axis aligned bones), removal of off-axis scaling from animated hierarchies, function publishing interfaces, utility panel integration and much more. The current demo can be downloaded from here.

Once of the most overbearing and demanding projects for the 2 years prior to the V4.1 release has been our implementation of the best skeleton & mesh skinning conversion system amongst Maya, 3ds max, XSI and DirectX (all bi-directional between any of these named packages). Skinning is also supported coming in from Kaydara FBX file format. This has prompted the development of our "Arctic" toolkit which handles the proper bi-directional conversion of the skinned meshes and skeletons, as well as a bevy of important processing functionality such as re-alignment of Maya bones which coming into 3ds max, removal of off-axis scaling from Bipeds coming out of 3ds max (including resampling all the animation curves), finding a "proper" bind pose coming out of Maya (there tends to be 3 but more than a few customer files are 'broken'), moving the skeleton hierarchy out of the mesh hierarchy when going from 3ds max to DirectX, fixing invalid skinning weights coming out of various 3D packages, equating one program's skinning system with another (everyone does it just a tad bit different than the others), etc.

PolyTrans-for-Maya has been one of our most demanded native plug-in systems since it was released in 1999. Now that the newest PolyTrans-for-Maya technology has been re-integrated into 3ds max (as the third generation PolyTrans-for-MAX plug-in system), we also now have one of the best bidirectional Maya/3ds-max conversion systems.

This is the original PolyTrans plug-in system for 3ds max which was accessible via the File/Import and File/Export menus of 3ds max. This has now been replaced by the third generation PolyTrans-for-MAX plug-in system which is a mirror twin to the popular PolyTrans-for-Maya plug-in system's architecture. See the previous entry for a full explanation of the features.