Havok Tutorial: Content Tools Part 1

What are the Havok Content Tools?

A time will come when you've got stuff working and want to flesh out a stage or something with physical objects like rigid bodies so that you can stand on grounds and smack walls... The Content Tools give you Maya, 3DS Max, and some other things I can remember because I don't use them, plugins that allow you to export entire scenes of physical objects for easy (seriously it's very easy) loading into your program.

I use Maya 2011 Student version, so what I have to say here will be about that.

After you've downloaded and installed the plugin (check out my other tutorials for that), open up Maya and go to WINDOWS>SETTINGS/PREFERENCES>PLUGIN MANAGER. Once there scroll down to hctMayaSceneExport.mll. Select both Auto load and Loaded.

Now on your main tool bar (the one with "File" at the far left) you'll see Havok Content Tools (to the far right probably).

To use this stuff, what you can do is create your geometry as you normally would in Maya, and then convert the meshes you want to into rigid bodies by selecting the mesh and then going to HAVOK CONTENT TOOLS > PHYSICS > CREATE RIGID BODIES. This will turn the selected mesh into a rigid body. A rigid body is a physical object the Havok engine can use to express things like surfaces and collisions with those surfaces.

Once you've created your stage/environment/level/world of rigid bodies you an go to HAVOK CONTENT TOOLS > EXPORT (click the box). Hit the export button and the Havok Content Tools Filter Manager should open up.

This part confused me even after reading the help manual that came with the Content Tools (which you need to read at some point). Basically you need to add the following filters in order to use the scene you've created as a bunch of physical objects in your game...

• Align Scene To Node
• Find Mesh Instances
• Transform Scene
• Create Rigid Bodies
• Optimize Shape Hierarchy
• Preview Tool

Now i'll be the first to tell you that I don't know (or care enough to remember) what some of these filters do. However I know that you need the Preview Tool for sure.

Once you have these filters in your Configuration Set hit Run Configuration. The Preview Tool will open and show you your scene running in real time. Nice.

To actually export what you've created to file (something I couldn't find out how to do anywhere) go to your live preview, FILE > SAVE. Now you can save your scene out in any format you choose to for easy loading into your game. I use HKT.

So that's how you make basic use of the Havok Content Tools Plugin for Maya 2011. I hope this helps out.