Re: .obj question

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

"Andrei de A. Formiga" wrote:
> 
> On 14 Jan 00, at 16:04, Cubesoft wrote:
> 
> > > Do you have any suggestions? I'm considering hand-editing the models I have
> > > (ones 1652 faces, the others only 132), or attempting to switch formats and
> > > start over :/ ). I looked on the web for specs on .3ds files, but the few hits
> > > that looked promising were dead links :/
> > Crystal Space got special permissions to use a program, called something like "impexp", in LGPL
> > code.  It works by comnveting several formats to its own format, then converts it out as the
> > desired format.  This instantly gave Crystal Space close to native support for about 5 more model
> > formats, including 3ds, so maybe you might want to look at the code, or see if you can use it
> > yourself
> >
> > http://crystal.linuxgames.com
> > http://crystal.sourceforge.net
> > http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=649
> >
> 
>         Another suggestion: Xclient, in the worldforge project, reads
> 3ds files if I'm not mistaken. You can try reading the source for it or
> talking with it's developer.
> 
> http://www.worldforge.org in the section Clients

There is also a 3DS loader for my PLIB SSG library.  It's only about
850 lines of code.

Unfortunately, I'm not too impressed by the 3DS format either. One
major problem is that it doesn't allow you to represent a heirarchy
of objects.  There are 'objects' which can contain a collection of
polygons - but no way to have objects inside other objects.

So far, of the 3D formats I've looked at, VRML looks the most reasonable
(if you ignore all the 'behavour' stuff and if you are prepared to deal
with all the built-in shapes like cubes and spheres and such).

The trouble with VRML is that it's *hard* to parse - although there are
some OpenSource parsers floating around.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
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