Dave (and everybody),
If your model file has to include animations, I'm not sure that all the
formats out there support it. 3DS does. Does .obj? Multigen has
movement constraints I think. VRML I have no idea...
It would be nice to see a table that addresses these items for each
format:
geometry (duh), hierarchy (grouping), texturing, multi-texture, TCB key
frame animations, lighting, levels-of-detail (LOD), switch nodes, morph
nodes, named nodes, etc
Also, caveats for each. For example, apparently 3DS only does 10
character node names (what tha!?!).
J. Lee Dixon
Software Engineer
SAIC - Celebration, FL
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: Yazel, David J. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2000 12:16 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [JAVA3D] 3DS Loader
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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