Now with this new Houdini the modeling pipeline has improved in quite a spectacular manner. This could make the program break into the game industry. Personally I am very happy with it. So happy that i ditched my modeler.

Now regarding my problem. Is there a way to export .X meshes from it?

I don't think there's an exporter for .X nor what it entails but have you tried exporting to .obj and then converting to .X ?

This way will just complicate the pipeline with another 3rd party app. Anyways for static objects that will do. But i do not know whether or not OBJ supports animated meshes or to what level.

I'm suprised that with where 3D software is right now .. meaning that .obj , u v particle velocity etc aren't going anywhere anytime soon … I'm suprised there isn't a universal 3D file conversion suite program out there anywhere.

Does anyone know of one? Having a standardized way to get animated mesh data to and from most mainstream apps would be a huge benefit to a lot of pipelines I think, expecially smaller ones without custom coders etc.

Maybe this is a job for Python?

andrewlowell
a standardized way to get animated mesh data to and from most mainstream apps

Well that would be Collada. I believe that Houdini supports importing but not exporting such files.

Regarding the DirectX issue, a Python export script would be great, but my codding skills are limited. Can anyone help with this?

I'm working on something right now.

I wrote a stand alone convertor for Geo->X in C# earlier this year. What it would do was take a “rest” geo file and a sequence of animated files and compile them into an X File with animation. I'm not going to release it because it's pretty cumbersome and really finicky about how the geo file is formatted. It doesn't support skeletal animation, obviously, because geo files only contain geometry.

There's a bunch of problems with X as a format, though, so I'm going to ditch it in favor of my own format. What I'm doing is writing a Python exporter embedded in an HDA that will write a custom format and I will also provide a content processor that will compile the format for XNA. The format will be similar to ascii X, but different in that it will actually support any attribute on any primitive type (I hope), as well as skeletal or baked geometry animation (which X doesn't do cleanly).

X is OK as long as you want just vertices with one set of colors, one set of UVs, and one set of weights. If you want arbitrary attributes it's a clumsy format to work with, and it has a lot of redundant data which is quite annoying.

Anyhow. I'm hoping to have this thing ready sometime after Siggraph now that we have a beta of Houdini 9. Keep an eye out for it on the exchange. Since I already have a class that generates X files, I'll see what I can do about making it generate simple X files as well. This is going to be one way though, out of Houdini.