[Papervision3D] Collada

[Carlos Ulloa]

Hello,

I'm working very hard on making Collada the best way to import 3D data in
Papervision3D.

The next revision of the importer (currently missing from the AS3 version)
is being rewritten from scratch in AS3 using E4X. It would parse a complete
scene, keeping the object hierarchy and supporting multiple materials per
object. It would even parse the object and material names, so they can be
easily accessed.

The engine has been redesigned to accommodate for all this. This is the
reason behind the matrices, hierarchy, instances, multiple materials, object
names... In the future it would support animation and cameras. It also be
great to parse texture filenames, so we could load scenes dynamically.

Collada is an open source format that's being developed by Sony America R&D
to be used on the PSP and PS3. They have been very helpful providing
documentation and answering questions. They also want to contribute to the
project doing qa, so we can make our importer really robust.

It's very well documented format that has been implemented in most next gen
platforms. I've used the code from Microsoft XNA Game Studio for reference.
There are free up-to-date plugins available for both Max and Maya (I'm
testing with both) and I think Blender also supports Collada pretty well.

This doesn't mean that it's also very cool to be able to read other formats.
I particularly look forward to include md2 in the distribution and also been
looking into reading Final Fantasy 7 characters. That would be an amazing
demo :)

But production wise, I believe our current bottleneck is getting the models
in. This is where many people, including myself, are spending most of the
time frustrated. I hope this changes make our life easier.

Coming soon as usual,

C4RL05
// noventaynueve.com
// papervision3d.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://osflash.org/pipermail/papervision3d_osflash.org/attachments/20070122/f1d9d1c2/attachment.htm