Re: [K3d-development] k3d XML file format and export feature

[Daniel A. <d.a...@gm...>]

On Sun, 27 Feb 2005 16:46:05 -0800, Timothy M. Shead <ts...@k-...> wrote:

> You probably ought to consider switching to 0.5, 

Already done that. I checked out k3d 0.5 from cvs friday
and got it to run yesterday. 

> the UI is greatly improved and there are many new features that would be of use to you.

Yes, I find the one-window UI much more appealing.

> Case in point: I restored the import/export UI yesterday, and moved the
> plugin-selection to the file dialog.

Cool, gonna update my CVS branch when I'm back home.

> > Texture (filenames or so) and Texture coordinates are not saved?
> > That'd be important to me...
> 
> It would be helpful to hear a bit more about what you're doing,
> experience has shown that use-cases tend to vary widely when doing
> import/export.  Some aspects of the procedural workflow require
> rethinking how things should be done, but we have some pretty innovative
> (I think) new functionality for import and export in 0.5, and I'd be
> willing to do some coding within reason to help you out, if you're
> willing to go into more detail.

Well, I'm actually not planning anythong big. At least not now.
I'm more or less playing around, trying to build some basic
tools and classes to work with OpenGL. Such as loading
textures, moving camera (easily), clipping, mouse picking
and such stuff.
I'm really bad at 3D and matrix maths, so there's a long
way to go for me. ;-)
Perhaps a 3D Tradewars-style space-strategy game would be 
cool and relatively easy to implement.

One point of this little framework would be 3D model loading.
k3d was the only free 3D modelling software that I could
find that was able to write something I can use for this purpose.
Well, there's blender, but I couldn't find any way in blender to save
as anything else than it's own file format, which I didn't want to
look at. I guess it'll just be too scary, considering the features
that blender is offering.
But as it turns out, there's still work to do for k3d to use it the
way I need it... basically, I want to read a bunch of textured polygons.
And maybe adding some meta-information (such as "insert this and
that special effect here") that I could use in my application.
From what I've seen, I think this is possible with k3d's plugin
mechanism. I'll look into this when I find some time. Maybe I
can even contribute something to the k3d project, I'd be proud to do so.

Here's a summary of what I'd like to have:
- Polygon vertices
- Texture coordinate to each vertex
- Either actual RGBA texture data or a filename (perhaps with
coordinates+width/height
  to load only a part of the image) to load it from, preferrably in
png file format.

Any pointers are greatly appreciated.

Bye,
   Daniel

-- 
eat(this); // delicious suicide