Getting Started

Relevant documentation

It's quite important to get an understanding of the fundamental concepts behind PathEngine, by reading the Fundamental Concepts and (to a lesser exent) Additional Features Overview sections in the overview.

After that, the remainder of this section of the documentation provides general information about issues relevant to content creators working with PathEngine markup.

Documentation specifically relating to integration with 3DS Max and Maya can then be found in the Tools section.
Content creators working on one of these platforms should read the relevant section of this tools documentation.
Content creators working on other platforms, but with access to either 3DS Max or Maya can also profit from understanding these platforms, because these are intended to provide a model for integration with other platforms, and because importing data into 3DS Max or Maya can be useful for troubleshooting issues on other platforms.

This section, in the programmers guide, whilst written for programmers, can nevertheless also be useful for a deeper understanding of how PathEngine works on the content side. (The PathEngine content exporters are essentially thin wrappers for this generally applicable functionality, which is now provided through the main PathEngine API.)

Installing the PathEngine SDK

While the SDK is not specifically targetted at content creators, this can be a useful aid in some situations.
Information about installing the SDK can be found here.

Playing with the examples included with the SDK can give you a good idea about the PathEngine 'movement model', and how the markup generated for an environment affects the possibility for movement by agents in that environment.
And the PathEngine testbed can be a useful tool for examining the ground meshes generated by content, for example for troubleshooting issues with these meshes, and also for getting an idea about exactly how these meshes affect movement.
Some documentation about the testbed (although targetted at programmers) can be found here.

The meshes and content chunks included with the SDK (and also with the playable demo) can also be imported into content creation applications to provide a concrete example for how to mark-up things like ground attributes and pinned shapes.