Games engines?
 

Hi guys, This is all new to me this games engine stuff, I have been using Maya for 2 years now but not in the games environment. My company are looking to get involved in the games market and as the in house Maya person It's my job to look into it. My question to you lot out there is which games engine is best suited for use in Maya?
Cheers for any help...

you should consider looking at these sites

http://www.intrinsic.com/

http://www.renderware.com/

they both work very well with Maya

Well, if you have some decent programmers on staff, it's possible for a studio to create their own engine. If you'd rather not put in that kind of time, I'm sure there are Maya compatible game engines out there. Engine stuff, at least so far in my experience, is mostly handled by the engineers and programmers. I've always just been told their engine requirements when it came to polycounts, texture resolutions, and model orientation, and such.

Perhaps try some game dev sites like... www.gamedev.com I think. There are others out there.

Good luck!

PS> I'm assuming you're the same fellow that emailed me. :) I'll let this be the response to that.

You could write your own game engine but as mtmckinley
said you would have to invest a lot of man-power to get that working. It's fairly simple(ish) to write a program that will load obj files from maya in (not sure about the texturing though) and I'm not sure how you load the animation in either.

if you background isnt in C++ (or similar language) you may want to look into using an existing engine.

:)
Alan

The Unreal engine is very popular, and freely available (obviously license fees do apply when its being used commercially).
It also links in very nicely with Maya via a plugin.
Look here http://udn.epicgames.com/ for more info/tutorials/downloads
Other engines that are widely used are the Quake 3 (getting a little long in the tooth now) and the lithtech engine which is comparitivly cheaper to the others (about $250,000)
hope this helps

btw: your not from Immersive Education are you? just curious :)

Re: Games engines?
 

I've had no trouble getting models into the Quake 3 engine. We've been very busy on a project using it for a year now. So I've not tested the waters in the new Unreal engine... yet ;). I expect no trouble with it though.
As you know, both of these engines have excellent technical support.

and, in the hands of a good programmer, I would think any engine, properly liscensed, could be modified to accept maya files.

let the games commence
 

Thanks for your reply folks, some good info there.
Im on a real steep learning curve here, I have to produce an interactive game/web site for a branch of the company which I work for. The modeling is nearly done and we have some talented programers on the case, but I dont understand out how to export my models with textures from Maya into what every engine is going to be use, Quake or Unreal. Is there an export plugin for Maya out to these engines???? oh loads of questions to be answerd...bring it on

Generally, you need an exporter plugin for Maya in order to get data into game engines. Most games engines that support Maya will have the plugins available.

I'm currently working with Renderware, and so far, it hasn't caused me any problems. From the art standpoint, it's really easy to use.

Out of curiosity, what company do you work for?