Hi all,
We have reached a point where we are interested in storing our complex
renderable entities in an efficient file format for loading when the
application starts and for data transmission.
I had always presumed that we could use the geometry compression APIs in
Java3D for the renderable part of this puzzle. After I implemented this
functionality today I discovered several things about the current support
for geometry compression in Java3D that make me ask the following question:
"Is anyone actually using compressed geometry in a real (i.e. you are
shipping it) application?"
The reason I ask this is:
a. Compressed geometry does not support texture information (This is the
killer, from our perspective - what non-simplisitic or industrial rendering
is interesting without textures?)
b. The compressed geometry APIs all have parameters of GeometryArray type
but the specification and our experimentation seems to support the idea
that not all GeometryArray objects are legitimate. In particular, it seems
that QuadArrays are not valid. (Another big problem given that most of our
entities are a mix of quads and triangles. While we can convert from quads
to triangles, we'd rather not for all the obvious reasons.)
So, I'd like to hear what folks are *really* doing when it comes to
persistent storage of complex, renderable data. We have written our own
set of loaders, of course, and can load a reasonable entity in several
(i.e. ~10) seconds from "native" format (i.e. what we post-process out of
Maya). But we cannot use this methodology when we are loading dozens, or
hundreds, of entities.
If the compressed geometry subsystem supported texture information and
arbitrary geometry arrays then we would just store CompressedGeometry
objects as part of our canning process and we would expect to see load
times of just ~1-2 seconds per entity.
Best,
Joe Kiniry
--
Joseph R. Kiniry
DALi, Inc.
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