Support for a more advanced 3D mesh format?
Pas-2
REALLY painful and tedious work. Would it be possible to start
supporting some ready established interchange format?
One possibility for this would be Autodesk FBX, which is already
supported by the major players in the 3D visualisation etc.
businesses. Autodesk, Microsoft, Newtek, Turbosquid and many others.
Also there are plugins for example Blender and many others who is not
part of the support group.
Using FBX instead of ogre mesh would allow importing of whole complex
scenes including materials, textures, animations, object hierarcy
(most important thing) and even character animation. Also it would
streamline and increase the speed of importing by thousand-fold (on
complex things like architectural visualisation).
Implementing this might not be trivial but would allow artists and
architects worldwide to easily transfer their stuff to rex. FBX
however does have its SDK online for download so the support COULD be
done.
You may find information about FBX here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=6837478&siteID=123112
Aki Kivirinta
Toni Alatalo
> supporting some ready established interchange format?
>
> Using FBX instead of ogre mesh would allow importing of whole complex
> scenes including materials, textures, animations, object hierarcy
> (most important thing) and even character animation. Also it would
>
FBX might be good, I don't know it well at all myself, but certainly
supporting something for complete scenes and something interoperable
across engines would be good.
One other possible format is Collada, which is a kind of open / industry
standard for game content - originally developed by Sony (and AFAIK is
the Playstation content pipeline format). Collada is usually used in the
XML form, ColladaXML. It also supports the different entities mentioned
above, and they have looked into even first steps to including AI in the
spec somehow. http://www.collada.org/ .. hosted by Chronos, which
manages the OpenGL standard as well. One reason why I haven't started
using Collada in our own games (which we make using Ogre) is the size of
XML files - for us it is simpler and more efficient just to use the Ogre
formats directly. I suppose FBX is more optimal so it would not have
that prob., but I think some people here are ready to trade performance
for interoperability.
Anyway to have stuff authored as FBX or Collada running in Rex, and
hence Ogre, it currently needs to be converted anyway to OpenSim scenes
and Ogre meshes. As long as that is so it is in a way not a big deal to
support even several input formats, as importers. At least for Collada
there are existing importers for Ogre (some sort of OgreColladaPlugin),
and it may be the same for FBX. For OpenSim they are just now talking
about their XML scene format(s) on opensim-dev, I guess importing
FBX/Collada scenedata to OpenSim would mean either writing an opensim
importer for those, or a translator that converts FBX/Collada to the
OpenSim format.
Refactoring the whole thing so that it would somehow use e.g. FBX or
Collada (or X3D..) internally would be a bigger thing .. and I'm not
sure what it would mean even, as opensim has it's own scene structure
anyway and the viewer loads ogre meshes anyway etc.
But perhaps supporting import&export for/to such common/standard formats
would help you. Or alternatively getting OpenSim scene XML format
support for your modelling application, and export tools that would
automatically create both those files and the Ogre meshes.
> Aki Kivirinta
>
~Toni
Mark Malewski
and Collada formats (industry standards) would be great for Game
Developers and modelers. Ogre is great, but it sure would be nice to
support FBX and Collada formats as well.
How we would do this, no idea (at this point), but it certainly does
deserve a discussion in the developer's thread. Could this possibly
be added to the realXtend Road Map as well Jani?
At least ear mark both of these ideas (FBX and Collada format support)
and then maybe we can have further discussions on this in separate
threads as to how we could implement these two formats from within
realXtend/OpenSim.
I think this would be extremely useful for the Game Developers. (I
could see how this sure would make their life easier). I would need
to take a look around and do some hunting and poking, and see if there
are any open source "converter" projects that maybe we could piggy
back off of, and implement into OpenSim/realXtend project.
I did find this thread on the Ogre forums, so it seems that some Game
Developers are somewhat desperate to have this feature added:
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2addons/viewtopic.php?t=8513
I supposed it would be a good feature to add to realXtend, to include
native support for these formats, or possibly create some form of
converter/importer. It does sound like a very valid and interesting
point, and I'm sure the Gaming Developers would probably love support
for FBX and Collada formats. Not sure how hard it would be to
implement, but it might be good to support several input formats (i.e.
FBX and Collada) as importers.
FBX is a good "cross platform" format, and exporting from Blender to
FBX seems to work even with the XBOX 360/XNA. So by using a standard
like FBX, at least game developers could develop games that would work
in realXtend, as well as in Playstation and XBOX 360 (using FBX with
XNA). It might save the Game Developer some grief.
Again, I don't know FBX well myself, but I could see having realXtend/
OpenSim supporting a very interoperable format like FBX would be very
good for the game developers.
I know FBX is owned by Alias (through an acquisition of FBX's creator,
Kaydara), and it's unknown as to whether FBX will be replaced by
Collada. I think Alias was bought out by Autodesk, so it's hard to
tell what the fate of FBX will be. It may be a dead end, but I
believe a developer is/was working on an FBX viewer for Ogre.
You can check out this thread here on the Ogre forums:
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14301&highlight=&sid=ce193664e1d3d7c4af509e6f4e2718c6
Thanks,
Mark
On Jul 2, 6:28 am, Toni Alatalo <ant...@kyperjokki.fi> wrote:
> Pas-2 kirjoitti:
>
> > supporting some ready established interchange format?
>
> (..)
> > Using FBX instead of ogre mesh would allow importing of whole complex
> > scenes including materials, textures, animations, object hierarcy
> > (most important thing) and even character animation. Also it would
>
> FBX might be good, I don't know it well at all myself, but certainly
> supporting something for complete scenes and something interoperable
> across engines would be good.
>
> One other possible format is Collada, which is a kind of open / industry
> standard for game content - originally developed by Sony (and AFAIK is
> the Playstation content pipeline format). Collada is usually used in the
> XML form, ColladaXML. It also supports the different entities mentioned
> above, and they have looked into even first steps to including AI in the
> spec somehow.http://www.collada.org/.. hosted by Chronos, which
Peter Quirk
realXtend 0.4 can longer import meshes converted from Collada. These
meshes imported correctly into realXtend 0.31.
I'm stuck not being able to import any content into te new release.
See http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend/browse_thread/thread/02102fa7512a7411#
-- Peter
>
> - Show quoted text -