Justin Couch wrote:
> Shawn Kendall wrote:
>
> > > 5. Loaders
>
> > Well, we did it. And it was a significant effort. The problem I
> > believe is that in the world of 3D, things are really getting
> > competitive, and if I have to write a loader to get my 3D Studio Max
> > content into some system, I will choose another system.
>
> Actually, that's bullshit. How many OpenGL or D3D loaders for every
> single known file format are floating around? There may be a few for the
> standard ones, but _every_ game company goes out an builds their own
> loader for their file format of choice because they want the output to
> be sorted according to their opitimsations in the rendering engine. To
> say that just because Java 3D has it as part of the standard API and
> there are not many implmentations therfore causes you to not want to use
> it is just a fallacy. Content is king only if it is usable.
I have read this passage several times and still am not sure what you are
saying here. Please restate when you can.
However, let me also clarify what I was saying...
My point was that in the scene graph world, loaders are expected. I can
quickly think of three other scene graph API's out there, Performer, VizKit,
Vtree. All of these include loaders for the major formats as part of there
system. As a matter of fact, we used VizKit for a short period, and at the
time they did not have a OpenFLT loader. We emailed the team, and THEY WROTE
one. It wasn't complete, but it did the job for what we were doing. Performer
comes with something like 30+, and usually they are very good as well.
It is true that for company XYZ's render engine, that they prefer to use there
own engine format, but that is not entirely due to optimizations. It is also
due to protecting content copying. But that does matter here, because Java3D
IS a rendering engine, therefore it should have loaders, even if just for it's
own scene structure.
Seriously, if one can not quickly and easily import the content their team
produces, their app is basically useless, and will be replaced by one that
can. Those people do not care about Java3D, OpenGL, DirectX or any of those
issues. The bottom-line is if it can't do it now, then something else will be
used.
One of the apps we use here is simply a model viewer. It has proved very
useful to us as it replaced "Perfly" (for the SGI crowd). I would love for
people out there to use it. But it can only load OpenFLT (which we wrote) and
the Sun loaders and NCSA loaders. Truth be told most models we try to load
blow up those loaders or produce geometry errors, except the .Obj. Therefore
it is mostly useless to anyone not using OpenFLT.
--
___________________________________________________________
Shawn Kendall Full Sail Real World Education
Course Director 3300 University BLVD
Real Time 3D for Gaming Winter Park FL 32792
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.fullsail.com
___________________________________________________________
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