Its been a little while since I posted, largely because I’ve been rather wrapped up in running the XBlig-UK meetings. Those of you following last month’s demo of Mod Tool will already know that XNA 4.0 has ‘broken’ the content importer provided by Autodesk for the native .xsi file type. Autodesk also seem very quiet on the topic of whether an update will actually be made available at all (not to mention the link to the Pro version mysteriously packing up last week too). That’s the bad news :(

The good news is that the latest version of the FBX export from Mod Tool is much improved and should provide all of the essentials. Unfortunately (as the GCC forum shows) the process of updating your exporters for Mod Tool is not as slick as it perhaps should be – in fact it is basically an entirely manual process!

SoftImage now uses the same shared import/export library as most of their other modellers – Crosswalk. So here are the steps you need to take to update these files:

• Download the latest version (v5.1 at the time of writing). You can get the installer here.

Once installed you now need to manually overwrite the crosswalk dll’s in your Mod Tool install.

• First locate the relevant files folder from newly installed Crosswalk – by default they will be in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Crosswalk5.1\Plugins\XSI\7.5
• Copy the dotXSIConverter.32.dll and FBXXSI.32.dll files
• Locate the existing Softimage crosswalk files – by default they will be in C:\Softimage\Softimage_Mod_Tool_Pro_7.5\Application\Plugins
• Paste your new files, replacing the ones already there.

To use the new exporter in XSI, you need to use the Crosswalk section on the File menu:

Finally, you should check when you export that the options dialog is reporting the correct version:

The resulting FBX files can now be loaded using XNA 4.0’s intrinsic content importers. So effectively the majority of the last movie in my last post is now redundant – but in a very good way!