Re: [Meshlab-devel] questions

[Paolo C. <pao...@is...>]

skunkwerk wrote:
> I had some questions about meshlab:
>
> 1)  There seems to be a renderman plugin in the source tree, but I 
> have to remove it as it never compiles... what's the status of the 
> plugin - is there anyone working on it?
No, it is not renderman, it is rendermonkey.
it is in the meshlab.pro.
the official pro are meshlabv11.pro
and meshlabv12.pro, use them.
>
> 2)  The support for importing .dxf files - the only gpl library to do 
> this seems to be coin3d's dime (http://www.coin3d.org/lib/dime). 
> <http://www.coin3d.org/lib/dime%29.>.. is anyone working on this?
No, nobody is working on it.
I do not know that using an external lib is the right  choice.
Dime is gpl but has no official release if i have well seen. dxflib 
could be another solution.
Browsing in the Blendercode could be another option.
We need to support a very limited subset of dxf (the 3d mesh part) so 
bringing inside meshlab another library could be not the best solution.

> 3)  I've noticed that when I try opening huge (~20 MB collada) files, 
> it takes about five minutes... but the actual filters are still quite 
> fast.  any tips on speeding up the time to load large files?  
> multithreading?  would running on a multi-core CPU be likely to speed 
> this up, or is it just dependent on the speed of the hard disk and 
> pipeline?
I have not examined well how is structued the collada parsing code.
There is surely a xml parsing code. but i have not investigated on that.
>
> 4)  as far as a texture atlas generator goes, should I use the opengl 
> library directly, or go through QtOpenGL, like some of the things in 
> meshlab do?  qt's library might not provide everything i need, but at 
> this point i don't know enough about opengl to be sure.  when textures 
> are loaded by an importer, where are they stored?
be careful here. Interaction between opengl and qt and the various 
plugins can be tricky.

A suggestion:
I appreciate a lot your enthusiasm, but I would like to suggest you to 
concentrate on a particular topic to avoid the dispersion of your efforts.
Try to bring the collada inport and export to the best possible state, 
improve its robustness, conformance and eventually its performance....

Cheers
p.

-- 
Paolo Cignoni  -- Senior Researcher
Visual Computing Laboratory - ISTI - CNR 
http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/~cignoni

ISTI - CNR 
Via Moruzzi 1,
56124 Pisa
ITALY