SpView
Alpha release V0.24

SpView is a mesh rendering program that can load Sims 2 GMDC format mesh files, as well as Spore .GMDL and .GMSH mesh files. The Sims 2 files can be extracted from the game, or custom content files using SimPE. The program includes a new format file extractor for Spore game files. The program itself does not edit or modify meshes or textures, just allows them to be combined, positioned and viewed.

Of course, a mesh would be pretty miserable looking (in this case, all white) without being colored or textured. SpView provides the capability, based on the underlying Ogre library code, to load any of a number of standard format image files (including PNG, JPG, TGA and DDS files) to be used in materials to paint the meshes with. It also has a tool to convert Spore .rast files to .DDS files, to allow direct support.

The program will also interface to the powerful and popular POV-Ray ray tracing program. The guy above (reddy) was rendered by POV-Ray (I did crop and convert to a transparent PNG file with Paintshop Pro V4). While SpView certainly does not support all of the capabilities of POV-Ray, it is very easy (once installed and set up) to get a basic creature, or creatures, or creatures and props, positioned and a basic render file created. SpView does not use or contain any of the POV-Ray program, it merely creates the type of input files that are required and will then pass the filename to POV-Ray for rendering.

NOTE: This program has not been updated since October, 2008. This may not work with the latest Spore patches.
No updates are planned at this time.
System Requirements:

We don't really know what the minimum requirements are - none of the machines here are lightweights. Previous versions have been reported to run on Windows 2000, XP and on Vista. There are no Mac or Linux versions available anywhere. This is a pretty heavy-duty program (even if much of the capabilities of Ogre are underutilized) and it might not perform very well on machines with less capabilities than a P4 processor and 512 MB of RAM. While the installation itself consumes less than 25 MB of disk space, you could easily burn another 200 MB (or more) in extracted game files, textures and related data.

If you keep your system fairly up-to-date, you probably have the right DirectX and Visual C++ 2005 support packages needed already installed on your computer. If you try to run SpView and get errors about either of these, you can download the files you need directly from Microsoft:

Click here to find the DirectX End-User Runtime

Click here to find the Visual C++ SP1 Redistributable

You will need several of the Ogre version 1.4.9 libraries, specifically OgreMain.dll, RenderSystem_Direct3D9.dll and RenderSystem_GL.dll. You can get these from the Ogre site, but they are included in some rather large download packages. I have packed these three files into the full installation archive.

The update installation file is 108 KB. Download here. Unless you have installed a previous version of the full package the installation will not run. If you previously installed an update package, you need to uninstall it before installing another. Be sure and just uninstall the smaller package, as the extra files that come from the full package need to remain on your hard drive.

The full installation package is 5.3 MB. Download here. This includes the Ogre libraries and example Graphics Data files (no Spore data). Extracting your own creature files is easy enough, as the program has an archive unpacking function for the newer Spore DBPF V2 file format.

After downloading, you may want to review or make comments on our Forums.

Copyright: This program is Copyright (c) 2008, Wesley Howe. All Right Reserved.

This program is licensed without charge for use on any computers it will work on. There is no warranty, express or implied, that it will function on any particular computer, or that it will do any specific thing. In any case, damages are limited to the amount paid for the program. You get what you pay for sometimes.

No license is granted to anyone to republish this program via any media or on any other website, for commercial or non-commercial uses, or to link directly to any of the download the files (link to the forum or this page only). No support will be made available through any means except via forum messages at www.customsims3.com. The use of any data files used with this program may be covered under separate copyrights and other licenses. Parts of the program are covered under the Ogre (www.ogre3d.org) licenses.

Revision History:

V0.24 - 20 Oct., 2008: Added additional DBPF file types to a new filter for the file open dialog in Unpack DBPF|DBBF. Modified Unpack archive to open changed EditorSaves from patch 2.

V0.23 - 12 Sep., 2008: Revised Hash dialog such that result may be copied to clipboard. Changed the unpack DBPF limit to just a warning for very large files, reconfigured the repacker for a higher number of files.

V0.22 - 08 Sep., 2008: Updated PMET for version 10. I also fixed the problem unpacking DBPF archives (all of the compressed files stayed compressed).

V0.21 - 08 Sep., 2008: Improved solid material specs for POV-Ray interface. Fixed confused rotation Axes. Added support for DBBF tagged package files. Modified GMDL to accomodate version 8 files.

V0.20 - 10 Aug., 2008: Added POV-Ray interface.

V0.19 - 06 Aug., 2008: Fixed insufficient buffer sizing for gmsh and gmdc loaders. Added Hash() function to tools menu (user contributed).

V0.18 - 31 July, 2008: Added Pack DBPF (V2) tool. Added more definitions provided by bugmenot.

V0.17 - 27 July, 2008: Revamped Load .RTS code to speed it up. Added file type definitions suggested by user bugmenot.

V0.16 - 16 July, 2008: Added a better error return for empty (zero index count) DBPF files. Added Save As and Load .RTS file functions.

V0.15 - 10 July, 2008: Packaged with Microsoft installer.

V0.14 - 08 July, 2008: Load Ogre Material menu item changed to fix exception issue. Tools->View PMET File added.

V0.12 - 05 July, 2008: Program revised and renamed to SpView. Support for Spore GMDL and GMSH files was added, as well as new tools for extracting Spore archive files and converting the .rast graphics format. Also, updated to the latest stable version of OGRE (Release 1.4.9).

V0.09 - 12 June, 2008: Added code to retrieve any saved names for submeshes (groups) with a fallback to names built from index value (previous method). Changed Add with new node to automatically create a new node name from the filename, and then divided into seperate menuitems for GMDC and Ogre formats. Added memory usage monitoring data to title bar.

V0.08 - 08 June, 2008: Corrected swapped pitch and yaw rotations on scenenodes. Added CustomColor load and restore (file S2View.cfg) for the Palette Color dialog. Added groundplane and backdrop creation and default texturing. Added light parameters to config file.

V0.07 - 02 June, 2008: Added save as .mesh (native Ogre) functionality. Revised create material and added new load ogre material functionality. Added code to stop graphic memory leaks. Add method to load .mesh into new or existing scene node. Added Selected SceneNode Properties (for scale only at this time).

V0.06 - 24 May, 2005: Added Dynamic Rendering option. Modified some mouse parameters for SceneNode selection. Added PoolWater and Transparent materials (shamelessly copied from the Ogre example materials).

V0.05 - 23 May, 2005: Added Toggle Node Visibility, added color selector dialog buttons to Edit Material dialog. Added L+R mouse buttons to emulate the middle button. The mesh loader was changed to allow meshes with more than four morphs to be parsed (although morphs themselves are not yet implemented).

V0.04 - 22 May, 2008: Fixes an inconsistent path issue when loading textures. Revised to allow a manual load and still autoload saved material files. In doing so, the Ogre standard resources.cfg file was added back, rather than using all hardcoded paths. This adds a lot of undocumented (here) capabilities.

V0.02 - 20 May, 2008: First alpha released for testing.