Basically I am putting together the beginnings of a fairly large open source
project which will require the efforts of contributing modelers.  I think it
is important to seperate the modeling work from the programming work.  That
being said, project specific conventions regarding HOW objects need to be
built would include:

- Tolerated polygon count
- Proper texture coordinates
- proper normal definitions
- Group naming standard
- Specific animation sequences per model class

By having modellers adhere to these standards we can have Java3d classes
which can work with the models effeciently, as in assigning material and
textures at runtime by referencing named groups, or starting animation
sequences at runtime.  I am not sure that the runtime version of our code
would want to load from the models directly, it could be that we would
generate java code and put appropriate pieces into compressed geometry.

So the important thing is to have method or means to have modelers use 3d
Studio Max, Bryce or the modeling software of their choice, have them define
the models, their texture coordinates, normals and animations.  Then have
them export that to a format which we can read into Java3d, without losing
any precious information.  Or have them save to a format that can be
properly converted to a Java3d supported format (maybe 3ds to vrml?).

So that is the basic problem in a nutshell.  I don't need to load 3ds
specifically, but I do need to load complex objects built by modelers.

Dave Yazel

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