Re: What to do.

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Jan Ekholm wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, Feb 17, 2000 at 05:03:12AM -0600, Steve Baker wrote:
> 
> >> I currently use AC3D for this kind of thing - but I'm working on
> >> a project to produce a better 3D model generator called PrettyPoly:
> 
> How actively is AC3D developed these days? 

It's not OpenSourced and the author hasn't produced a new release for
over a year.  It has some significant problems - which is why the
PrettyPoly project is working hard on a replacement.

> I've been thinking about really
> paying that 25$ (or similar), and get something that I could use for my
> pet projects. Modelling with millimeter-paper and pen, and then
> 'extracting' triangles manually is a bit clumsy. :-)

Yuk!

> Does AC3D export something that can be easily parsed, i.e. ascii triangles
> or strips?

It's native format is '.ac' which is ASCII and pretty easy to parse.
I wrote an OpenSourced parser that generates OpenGL - that's on the AC3D
website somewhere.  I also have a loader for PLIB's "Simple Scene Graph"
API, which also works with OpenGL.
 
> >>    http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net
> 
> Hope this project is successful, as a real open modeller is quite
> important today.

Yep.  I'm pleased with the progress of this project - and whilst we
have quite a way to go before we have something useful, it'll be
a highly extensible system for which you'll be able to write plugins
in Python.

We are trying to keep PrettyPoly focussed on the having all the
essential things you need for OpenGL modelling.  Once the first
version is released, we'll start looking at the fancy features
that might be desirable for other applications.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker@hti.com      (work)