Hi, Robert,
Robert Osfield wrote:
About 10,000 or so, just for the COLLADA elements. A lot of it relies on
existing VESS classes too, so that number is probably a bit low, although a
lot of the code is basic DOM-like functionality that just parses XML into
various objects and structures.
That's a pretty big chunk.
Yeah, I suppose it is, it seems less now that it's done, but I guess I
was busy for a while with it.
What was the motivation for writing this code? You mention the the
COLLADA DOM didn't look easer to use than rolling your own. I presume
that the OSG's plugin didn't expose enough data that you need in your
application.
Right. In general, we needed an art path between 3ds MAX and VESS, and
specifically, we needed it for animated characters. We had an existing
Cal3D-based solution, but it was getting harder and harder to maintain.
osgAnimation had been talked about then, but it hadn't really gone
anywhere yet, and we already had some of the needed data structures in
place from the Cal3D work.
Are you building the OSG scene graph for your collada
representation?
In a way :-) COLLADA kind of has two phases, the creation of
"library" objects, and then the instantiations of those objects into the
visual scene. The VESS COLLADA loader first parses the XML library
objects into the corresponding classes, and then these are instantiated
into VESS nodes and attributes.
A big part of VESS is the scene graph abstraction layer (which proved
quite useful to us when Performer died). VESS nodes and attributes are
implemented (in this version) using the appropriate OSG objects. So,
I'm not constructing an OSG scene graph explicitly, but there is one
being constructed.
I ask these questions as I'd expect many others will be in a similar
position. If there might be a way to solve several problems at one
time then it'll be a much more compelling task to rewrite our plugin,
rather than just trying to fix the compile issues.
Perhaps it might be possible to take your VESS collada code as a base
and create an OSG + VESS compatible library that both projects could
use.
Well, I don't think there will be a problem with contributing the code.
I'm a bit skeptical as to how useful it will be, as a lot of it is
pretty specific to the way VESS works. I suppose it may be better than
starting completely from scratch, though, and it's commented pretty
thoroughly, so it should be understandable. I can't promise I'll have
time to work on it myself, but I'll try, and I can certainly answer any
questions that come up.
Let me know if you want to move forward with this, and I'll see what we
can do.
--"J"
_______________________________________________
osg-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
