Rendering in XNA 4 without the content pipeline

Rendering in XNA 4 without the content pipeline

Satsujin (guest) 09 May 2014 07:29

Hi,

Do you have any tutorials or are you aware of any sites that explain how to render meshes along with materials, textures and animations in XNA without using the Content Pipeline?
Using the AssimpNet importer, I have managed to render the faces of an OBJ file exported from Blender in my XNA C# program using BasicEffects and DrawIndexedPrimitives. I am only doing this as a hobby, not for any reason other than curiousity to see how far I can take it. The Scene object that defines the OBJ imported from AssimpNet stores info for materials, textures and animations but I am not sure how to traverse it or render this information in XNA. Do you know where(sites,books) I could find this info?

Re: Rendering in XNA 4 without the content pipeline

rbwhitaker 09 May 2014 18:34

As far as rendering stuff, between BasicEffect and writing your own shaders and my primitives tutorials, you should be able to draw anything you want.

As far as actually traversing what gets imported by AssImp-Net, you'd have to look it up on their website or the AssImp website proper. I would imagine that what you'll want to do is convert it from AssImp's format into something easily renderable in XNA after loading.

The Model class works well for this in a lot of cases, but it was never intended to do everything. The contents of 3D models varies widely. It's not one-size-fits all. The creators of XNA felt like they had a hard decision to make. Do they leave it all out and let you build your own? Do they try to do it all, at the cost of cutting out other features? Their ultimate solution was to build the existing Model class and for the times that it's not good enough, let people build their own version and draw it themselves using primitives and drawIndexedPrimitives etc.

Anyway, that doesn't give you all of the answers you were looking for about the specific structure of data loaded with assimp, but it perhaps it gives you some starting points!