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I'm wondering if there's any way to export a model that was created in Maya, into a format that could be easily read to OpenGL. Maya has one of the best User Interfaces of any 3D modeling program I've seen, and I'd hate-hate-hate to step down to Blender's Battlecruiser-esque UI for something as intricate as character modeling.
Thank you for your time, and any help or suggestions would be great~
OpenGL is low-level graphics API, and as such, it doesn't have any model loading facilities. Meaning the format you'll use is entirely your choice - you'll have to either write your own loader (can be preferred for simple formats like ASE) or use existing code/library. Once the data (vertices, faces, normals, texture coordinates ..) are loaded in the memory, you can pass them to OpenGL in numerous ways. I'm sure maya has number of exporters into different formats, so the question boils down to what features should the format have - should it be simple mesh data, or anything more, including animations ?
An easy format to use quickly is the maya .obj - format. You can export it with maya after activating the corresponding export plugin. It can write obj files in ascii format with a quite simple format, which can then be read in a simple parsing loop.
Depending on your Maya version the format writes indexed lists of vertices, normals, texture coordinates (u/v) and a list of faces, where every face is defined by the indexes to the vertices, normals and so on. Quite straight forward...
Note: You can tell maya what you want in the file in the export options.
Note2: Ascii can be inefficient for large models, but its easy to debug.
I remember a tool called Deep Exploration...