----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Originally posted by me in the online forums of the Web3D Consortium.Originally titled: Blog: RawKee X3D Exporter for MayaFeb 20, 2005http://www.web3d.org/----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Well, let's see if this lasts more than a week. I'm going to try something in the hopes that the Web3D message boards liven up a little and get some excitement built up for RawKee in the process. I'm going to start a RawKee blog.For those who don't know, RawKee is the X3D exporter plug-in for Maya. Open source (http://rawkee.sourceforge.net/) so in case I find myself no longer able to work on it, someone else might be able to move it forward. I really hate when some software I use disappears because a company folds. And with web-based 3D this has happened several times in the past.So who am I and why am I writing an X3D exporter for Maya? Well, I'm a graduate student in anthropology/archaeology. I work for the NDSU Archaeology Technologies Laboratory (http://atl.ndsu.edu/) in Fargo, ND. We create 3D models of archaeological artifacts and 3D reconstrutions of archaeological sites for research and education.The dot com bust hurt our projects because some of the products we counted on for our work just disappeared. The worst was CosmoPlayer/CosmoWorlds. There is only so much money in any grant budget for software. Even less in archaeology. It was spent. Luckily, Alias provided us with several copies of Maya through its Research Donation Program. The only problem was that it isn't easy to export content into X3D from Maya. Alias had written a prototype X3D mesh exporter as an example for Maya's fileTranslator tutorials, but it comes no where close to utilizing the full power of Maya. Not only that, but I really wanted a one-stop solution for generating X3D. So in November of 2003, after attending the Alias MEL course, I embarked on a quest to develop a CosmoWorlds-like plug-in for Maya that would not only allow the content author to export mesh and texture data, but provide an interface for exporting H-Anim, Nurb, scripting, and sensor data as well. It hasn't been easy. When I started my lab couldn't afford Alias API tech support, I didn't know anything at all about the Maya API, and I didn't even know how to program C++. So why did I do it? Well, out of frustration really.While at Siggraph 2003 I had a conversation with a colleague. I said "Don't they know we need exporters?" My colleague said, "Physicists learned computer programming because the computer scientists wouldn't do it for them. Welcome to the club." In other words, if you can't do it yourself, you'll just have to wait. But I wanted a decent exporter sooner rather than later and the current Maya X3D exporter and the old VRML97 exporters just weren't cutting it. So I decided to go ahead with it. I had java programming experience, and I didn't think programming C++ could be all that bad. Besides, where else would I get X3D multitexture export?So now I find myself either in a good position or bad. I regularly get email asking about the status of the exporter. Even with Collada, there is still quite a bit of interest for use of X3D in games. So pressure, pressure pressure. The conference deadlines are coming up: Web3D Symposium, GDC (I've received a request to have multitexture export done in time for the GDC expo - don't know if it'll happen), the Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference, the Maya API Conference, and of course Siggraph.Anyway, that's all for now. Hopefully, I'll keep this up. If anyone is listening, see you when I next post.