[Plib-devel] Offer for a VRML2 to SSG converter

[Paolo L. <p.l...@ci...>]

Dear Plib SSG friends,

I have written a 3D model file converter from the VRML2/97/X3D to SSG, which
I'd like to offer in source code to the Plib community. It is based on the
CyberX3D library (http://www.cybergarage.org/vrml/cx3d/cx3dcc/index.html),
which, in turn, relies on the xerces-c XML parsing library
(http://xml.apache.org/xerces-c/). All the libraries and the converter are
multi-platform, even if I'll only supply MS VC++ 6/Express project files
(Windows) and the Win32 exe.
The converter includes optimization option on the command line, and loads
every non-VRML file through ssgLoad, so it can also be used for model
conversion and optimization.

In principle it would be quite easy to make it a SSG format loader (it
actually reads the VRML data into its own scene graph, then this is walked
for conversion into corresponding SSG nodes), but the dependency on these
additional libraries doesn't properly fit into the Plib philosophy. On the
other hand it's hard to start from scratch for every model format. I choose
CyberX3D over other similar libraries for the easiness to walk the
scenegraph, and because nodes are very similar, and are accessed similarly,
to the SSG ones.

In the present form we could consider to put it into the "tools" section of
the distribution.

Greetings -

Paolo Leoncini