Hi again all, I have a question about texture loading. A little background: At Dali, we are rendering dynamic, skinned articulated rigid bodies in real time. Such entities require many pieces of data to describe. We have written six loaders for this data: skeletons, muscles, mesh, materials, weights, and textures. We use Maya to generate all of this data. The interesting thing is, the texture loader is actually one of the harder parts to get right! For the first week or so we used the ObjLoader that is included with Java3D to load our mesh, material, and texture information. We had several difficulties with this package (com.sun.j3d.loaders.objectfile) so we performed a code review and found some of the most "interesting" Java code we've ever seen. Who wrote this package, an intern? We have since written our own OBJ loader, learning from the mistakes in the Sun source, so to speak. Actually, to be more accurate, we have used JavaCC to write all of our loaders - no crazy manual parsing here! Now to the crux of this message. I have seen probably a half-dozen ways to load textures. Examples come from: the Java3D tutorial, the demo source code, the Sun provided source, other misc Java3D examples online, etc. It seems amazing to me that nearly every example I come across uses a different mechanism to load a texture. What's more, nearly all of the techniques do not work on all platforms! To be precise, "all platforms" means Java3D on Linux and Windows with both the OpenGL and DirectX back-ends. Does anyone have any suggestions for the most straightforward and "correct" way to load textures that works reliably on all platforms? Its obvious that there are a dozen ways to do it in Java, but it seems that all ways are not created equal. If only we'd learned from X11(*), Joe Kiniry -- Joseph R. Kiniry DALi, Inc. California Institute of Technology (*) There should be (nearly) only one way of doing any "thing". X11 is an infamous example of where you can do any "thing" over a dozen different ways. Imagine having five accelerators, three brakes, and two and half steering wheels in your car - you get the idea. =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
