Mustang

I think I understand where your going with this. You would use weights as placements to act as bones in your own format, replicating the rig data?

In relation to an ma/mb format to extract data, would be.... well it may be a little more complicated, if you only want to allow specific thing such as bones, and mesh data to be extracted I suppose you should much rather go with fbx.

If you can work around getting much more data out of ma and mb formats you might find it useful to do this in 3ds max and lightwave files.

Lightwave, 3ds max, and maya lights, and materials may help allot with extracting some very intriguing results.

But if your working around hlsl shaders if I remember correctly they are direct x shaders, glsl or whatever they are for open gl shaders may be something you can add if you wish to work on other OS's, since Open Gl can be used on all 3 major OS's I assume glsl shaders would be best to go with and not hlsl.

If you use skinned weights, the probability of mesh deformation could be different for many different formats, if you were to export from ma to fbx, an animation or mesh deformation that looks correct in maya, may look much different when imported or re-imported into maya or another program via an exported fbx.

So the chances of compatibility with what your looking for by extracting data could be messed up a little bit.

If you do go looking how to extract data from 3ds max, lightwave and maya, even xsi, it would be a really good idea to support lighting exports, or imports from your engine into these programs.

Lights, materials, mesh and rig data.

__________________