File Translator to Export Animated 3D Character from Autodesk Maya as Quake MD2

Question

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a way to export geometry/textures for a rigged, animated character as Quake MD2? I’m developing an app for mobile devices, and I’ve found that MD2 works great for lightweight OpenGL rendering. I have several animated characters, and I’d like to export them as MD2 from Maya. Here are some of the things I have tried:

1. Exporting FBX to 3D Studio Max and using the QTip plugin -- this works, but only if I convert my animation to point cache (pc2) and bring that into Max. When I do that, QTip plugin doesn’t honor the point cache node, and all I get is the model, no animation

2. Exporting OBJ Sequence to Blender, exporting MD2 from there -- I can’t seem to get blender to compile the imported obj sequence into a single animated object

3. Exporting FBX to Milkshape -- the maya rig gets corrupted in the process

4. Bake point cache for animation, export to FBX, import to Milkshape -- again, Milkshape doesn’t honor the geometry cache, so all that appears is a static character.

I’m currently writing a plugin for Maya using the blender MD2 export script as reference (but re-writing using the C++ Maya API), but I’m just wondering if anyone has done this before or has any suggestions of how to do this.

Also, if anyone has other suggestions for the best format to render a single animated character on an OpenGL ES (Android or iPhone) device, I would be very grateful! I’m open to trying anything to get these animations rendering on device

Thanks!

Answer 1

If anyone is interested, I ended up solving this problem by just writing my own plugin for the Maya API that exports Quake MD2 files. I've released it as open source on github:

http://github.com/arifken/MD2Export

Answer 2

You are a god. I've been searching for something like this for a year, and had a convoluted export import routine to get to md2.