Which tool can convert a Torque .dts file?

Question

Into a more common 3D model format such as 3ds, max, or obj.
I know that it is possible (someone did it for me but won't tell me how).
There's a tool called Shaper that looks like it could do it but I'm not sure (the soft doesn't run well on Wine and development has been abandoned and author can't be contacted).

Answer 1

In the latest Torque 3D, try importing yout DTS-Model and then in the Level Editor, select your model, choose File, Export to Collada. I'm not sure this will work with DTS-Models, but it might be worth a try.

Answer 2

The best file conversion tool around (although I don't know if it runs on WINE) is Ultimate Unwrap. Although the original/primary purpose of the tool is implied in its name, texture mapping, it has a very extensive list of file formats that can be imported and exported:

http://www.unwrap3d.com/u3d/formats.aspx

Answer 3

People who wont tell you how they preformed a conversion, just don't want to show that they used some conventional method or someones else program, and want to instead take credit for it. I'll tell you right now how to preform ANY conversion of any format to another (similar) format. That is, if you're asking from a programmatic point of view. Most conversions are done by a program that obviously has features made for that.

Follow this extremely basic structure, though I know it sounds harder than it is:

1. Learn everything you can about both the format you're converting from, and the format you're converting too. Without any information on the formats you may never know anything about the conversions!
2. Load all the data of the target file in the original format. (If it's 3D load up all the vertices, indices of vertices, load up the face indices and all that data you need, the normals, texture UV coords, etc)
3. Export the data following the target formats information and structure.

In this example, you should also recognize that the best way to go about this is to have 2 separate classes or structures that should contain the data, as it may be easier to convert ones float data (e.g), to integer data in the other file, if you do it at load time rather than when you export the data to a different format.

Examples are that .obj and COLLADA are both easy to read text formats (or can be in text format) that can be converted to each other pretty easy after loading one.