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Re: K3D some early impressions.



On Sat, 30 Jun 2001, Steve Baker wrote:

> 
> As you may know, I've been looking into the K3D modeller which runs on
> both Linux and Windoze, is GPL'ed, and seems pretty much like a finished
> product.

They are in version 0.1.29 - but I agree, it looked very smooth to me.

> So, here are my impressions of K3D after just a couple of days of use
> and from the perspective of someone who wants to build models for realtime
> use - rather than raytracing or some such non-realtime activity.

Thanks a lot for taking the time out to do this. 

> I grabbed a copy of K3D, I also needed to upgrade GLIB and GTK (it needs
> pretty recent versions of both) - and *much* later discovered that I needed
> to install a package called 'NetPBM' which contains a bunch of image file
> format convertors.

I also had to upgrade stuff to make it compile. Unfortunatly the
./configure scripts seems to be not very clever.

> Right now, the tool loads and saves in either '.OBJ' (Wavefront) or
> it's own XML-based format.  I tried feeding it OBJ files made in other
> tools - and also importing K3D's OBJ files into other tools - and without
> exception, the result was an unholy mess.  Plan on writing an XML parser
> if you want to use K3D...fortunately, the *one* good feature of XML is
> that this tends to be reasonably easy.

Maybe someone will add a k3d loader to plib. ;-)

> 
>   Should this be cause to abandon PrettyPoly?  Well...we should discuss that...
> K3D seems to have hit all of the objectives of PPE.  I'd like to prod around
> inside K3D for a while and see how easy it actually is to interface to K3D's
> internals.  Certainly K3D would benefit greatly from some of the ideas in PPE.

The true benefit of OSS - we all benefit from the good ideas and good
work. That is great. I hope for the best for both editors.

Thanks again for taking the time to look at it.

Mads

-- 
Mads Bondo Dydensborg.                               madsdyd@challenge.dk
At some point, bits have to go into packets and routers need to make 
decisions on them. Changes at that level is what I want to hear about, not 
strategic company relationships.

   - John Carmack, commenting on why he (for now) does not actively support
the PowerPlay initiative