3D PrintScreen -> a very similar tool to OGLE
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This week I found a very similar tool to OGLE.
3D PrintScreen is free software that allows the capture of OpenGL data (geometry, normal, lines, colours and Textures!!). I have tested it, and the result is very interesting.
This tool is really easy to use:
- installation
- launch it
- launch an OpenGL software (no special setting needed, no dll to copy)
- press F10 and it’s done
This soft generate 3D XML files (some kind of new XML format like colada I guess).
Those files can be opened by a free viewer called 3D XML player.
I’ve tested it on games. The results with Quake 3 and wolfenstein are really good; we can see the mesh with textures, the billboards with alpha channel…. impressive.
However the results on google earth are really bad :o(
The captures of second life doesn’t works with textures but the result is nice without (there is a setting to disable the capture of textures).
No test on WoW for the moment (I’m a guild wars player ;-)
I heard that 3D PrintScreen works also really well with CAD softwares.
I think I will use OGLE or 3D print screen to be sure to get a good result cause for me they look complementary.
If anyone wants to test it, here is the download link:
http://www.3ds.com/products-solutions/3d-for-all/3d-xml/3d-printscreen/
hotdamn. which just goes to show, presentation is everything. how easy would it have been for 3DS to get as much love on the web as OGLE!?!?!
and, of course, also recalls the value of open source -- if 3DPrintScreen doesn't work with SL, there's nothing you can do. also, what format do they use? something proprietary, tho open since it's XML. hmmm
any clue when this was put out?
The download page says:
"Date posted : September 13 2006"
about the output format, it's also said :
"Openness : Saved geometry is fully described in XML. Thus it can be easily read or written in your standard XML editor. For 3D XML information, please refer to the 3D XML xsd guide."
I’ll try to see if it’s true or not.
it looks really open.
when you unzip the .3dxml file and open it with a text editor, you can see lots of tags (<VertexBuffer>,<Positions>,<Normals>,<TextureCoordinates>,<Faces>,<Color>....)
but there's nothing about shaders
if it's XML it's certainly open; but the question is how usable a format is that. i.e. does any other software besides theirs support it? at this point I don't think so, but it's easy to write transformer scripts.
since it seems like their software is new, I'd of course love to know if it was at all inspired by OGLE. I will put a link to their tool from the OGLE site.
thanks for the info,
mike
Mike, you are right, no DCC software supports this file format. I think they want to focus on collaborative work with CAD software first (like the two other OpenGL grabber in fact).