Game Engine Architecture

50 1. Introduction

Digital Content Creation (DCC) Tools

Game World

Game Object

Mesh

Skeletal Hierarchy Exporter Skel.

Hierarchy

Animation Exporter Animation

Curves

TextureTGA DXT Compression TextureDXT

World Editor

Definition ToolGame Object

Material Game Obj. Template

Animation Set

Animation Tree Editor

Animation Tree

Game Object

Game Object

Conditioning Asset

Pipeline

GAME

soundWAV

Audio Manager Tool

Sound Bank

Mesh Exporter

PhotoshopPhotoshop

Sound Forge or Audio ToolSound Forge or Audio Tool

Game Object

Maya, 3DSMAX, etc.Maya, 3DSMAX, etc.

Custom Material Plug-In

Houdini/Other Particle ToolHoudini/Other Particle Tool

Particle Exporter Particle System

Figure 1.31. Tools and the asset pipeline.

1.7.2. Asset Conditioning Pipeline

The data formats used by digital content creation (DCC) applications are rare-

ly suitable for direct use in-game. There are two primary reasons for this.

1. The DCC app’s in-memory model of the data is usually much more
   complex than what the game engine requires. For example, Maya stores
   a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of scene nodes, with a complex web
   of interconnections. It stores a history of all the edits that have been
   performed on the fi le. It represents the position, orientation, and scale
   of every object in the scene as a full hierarchy of 3D transformations,
   decomposed into translation, rotation, scale, and shear components. A