QSDK 1.1 Documentation

Art

Contents

• Introduction
• Textures
• Meshes and Skins
• Lights and Shaders
• Animations
• Animation State Machines
• Fonts
• Particle Systems
• Scene Building
• Reference Documentation
• Art Tutorials
• How to....
• Max Exporter User Guide
• Maya Exporter User Guide
• QStudio Documentation
• Tools Documentation

Introduction

The QSDK supports a complete authoring pipeline for textures, meshes, skins, lights, shaders, animations, fonts, particle systems and scene building.

Textures

The Q engine makes use of diffuse and specular texture maps. Alpha channels of diffuse maps are handled correctly, and there are optimizations for handling boolean alpha textures, i.e. textures where pixels are either opaque or totally transparent. 

Textures may also be animated.

A variety of texture formats are supported by the QSDK. The exporters automatically pass the textures used in Max or Maya files into the resulting Q files. Textures may also be added explicitly to Q files if required; this is generally used for UI textures and particle effects.

Meshes and Skins

The QSDK comes with exporters for Max and Maya which handle meshes, skins and their levels of detail.

For skins, the Q engine supports up to four bone influences per vertex.

See the QDemo2 production guide for more information on component building in Max and Maya.

Your programmers can use the QSDK to create exporters for other authoring packages if required. Source code is supplied with the exporters to help them get started.

Lights and Shaders

The Q engine supports:

• Full Phong lighting with specular lighting, mapping and colors.
• Spot lights
• Omni-directional lights
• Ambient lighting
• Emissive lighting
• Vertex coloring
• Additive blending

Lights and Shaders can be authored in Max or Maya. We recommend tweaking them in QStudio for true WYSIWYG editing.

Animations

All scene graph objects including skins can be animated in Max or Maya. See the tutorials and exporter documentation for more information. Texture animations may be authored in Max.

Animation State Machines

QStudio may be used to author complex animation state machines to drive skins in your application.

Fonts

TrueType fonts can be imported into Q files.

Particle Systems

A wide variety of particle effects can be authored and placed in QStudio.

Scene Building

Meshes and skins built in Max may be assembled into scenes within Max. Alternatively, scenes using components built in Max or Maya may be assembled in QStudio.

Reference Documentation

• Art Tutorials
• How to....
• Max Exporter User Guide
• Maya Exporter User Guide
• QStudio Documentation
• Tools Documentation

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