Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
In case you do not have any 3D content creation tools installed and you just want to check out some FBX files,
you can use the FBX QuickTime plug-in from Autodesk to look at FBX files (see Figure
3-7
).
Figure 3-7.
Using the QuickTime FBX plug-in to check out 3D models
The FBX SDK (the current version is 2014.1
4
) is very complex and outside of the scope of this article. Sadly, the
SDK is also only available for C++ and Python, which makes it a bit harder for .NET developers or other language users
to use. If you are working with the XNA content pipeline, you can use the FBX content importer directly, but you won't
have much control over it.
Alternatively, you can write a little tool to convert FBX files into your own format or write a library using the FBX
SDK for your content pipeline. If all you need is to convert from one format to another (e.g., from FBX to COLLADA if
you only want to support COLLADA directly), you can also use the FBX converter tool, which comes in both a GUI and
a command-line version, making conversions among FBX, COLLADA, 3ds, DXF, and OBJ easy (see Figure
3-8
).
