[appologies if this doesn't make much sense. 2:30am and I'm about to go to sleep :) ] Mario Juric wrote:
> � believe SVG is an interesting format, but I want to undertand the gains > with respect to texture compared to plain image formats? SVG is not necessarily a replacement for a plain image format. Where it is useful is if you want to define 2D vector graphics. I supposed the closest format would be something like Flash. Adobe are pushing SVG as a replacement to their flash format, so that's a good thing too. What SVG adds is a layer of runtime information too, so you can animate text or 2D vector drawing. It does image clipping and more. The way I was looking at it was to build an animated texture that basically gets the SVG renderer to feed us new frames each time we need one. > It also requires > that our 3D modeling tool (Maya in our case) can work with SVG, but which > tools currently do? Most current 2D tools. I have PaintShopPro here and that will output native SVG. Some of the adobe stuff does as well (not sure on details). Maya wouldn't need to directly support SVG. I assume that your artists generate textures in tools like Photoshop rather than Maya, so that's one bonus of going with the SVG output. You get nice, anti-aliased lines, (done in hardware if using VolatileImage) without needing to pre-compromise your capabilities or rendering. For us, it becomes a cheap way of implementing VRML's Text node. Frome what we can tell, we cannot use J3D's Text2D node to implement the full requirements of the VRML Text node and so need to come up with some other system to do this. FWIW, Text/FontStyle is quite poorly handled by all VRML renderers. The spec is quite vague and way too open ended. Hopefully some of that will be fixed. In addition for us, it is one extra sexy demo - we can show XML content that is mixed - ie it contains X3D and SVG in the one file. > What SVG tools are there? Batik? Renderers? Batik is the most likely one we would use. Adobe has one too. That's the limit of my knowledge currently. (hmm... I think IBM has one too) >>Maybe, I could also get the overlay code going again to push it into that > area. > In which way does this fit with the overlay code? We're looking at this mainly from the X3D perspective. We need, effectively, 2D HUD objects. By using SVG, we can draw complete HUDs very simply over the top of the 3D world. Use DOM to change the HUD content or shape on the fly. Also, it allows a content person to change the look and feel of the application using an external file format rather than having to need a programmer. From a game designer's perspective, think of the benefit that would give. Instead of needing to code the UI, the designer just needs to get the artist to mock it up in photoshop et al, and then restart the game. Very quick updates and changes to the look and feel. -- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant ------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== 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".
