I'm interested in creating a tool that parses Collada files and supports rigged 3D models for animation and interaction. How does Blender interpret a Collada file (and rigging in general)?
Any resources on computer graphics and rigging would be greatly appreciated as well.
You can find documentation on the collada file format at The Kronos Group.
Blender uses the OpenCollada library to import and export collada files.
If you want to start with something a little lighter you can have a look at the collada exporter made by the developers of the godot game engine.
Related
Im working and animating models on 3Ds max, but i need to import for example a horse to the poser to do more animating on characters face. please help me do that if everybody knows how to do it.
Poser is very restricted when it goes for importing and exporting rigged and animated objects. The best (and probably the only) way to do that is by using an .FBX format with rigging, which is sadly available only for Poser Pro Game Dev variety of the app, and then, importing into 3ds Max can produce some weird results. In most cases the rigging will be slightly off and the bones will be very tiny / weird, but you can try and give it a shot. That's the only way to do it without re-rigging the whole thing. Wonder how DAZ Studio export rigged FBX files...
As part of my software I have to somehow convert and display Esri ASCII (.asc) files on a leaflet map.
The files are in the filesystem and the backend is in nodeJS.
.asc is a raster format and gdal_translate manages to translate the files as I like. Unfortunately I can't use GDAL in node and as far, as I see it, gdal-node is not able to convert the files. Manually converting files is not an option.
My data is always somehow geo referenced, so if I get an image, it has to be placed on the right spot on the worldmap.
Help would be highly appreciated, because I feel kinda overwhelmed by all this GEO stuff.
If you want the normal set of features Leaflet offers, like zooming, what you need is called a map tile service.
There are a few map tile standards that Leaflet supports. Generally though, making map tiles is complicated — particularly if your ASCII grids are in lat/long but you're using a background layer from Google, Bing, OSM that's in "web Mercator" — so you probably don't want to write one in Node yourself.
Look at GeoServer and see if that will fit into your setup.
for a university project I have to compute a 3D mesh, then display it.
By mesh I mean a list of triangles, where each point has a specific elevation.
What is the easiest tool that exists both on windows and linux that would allow me to display such a mesh?
I just want to be able to visualize the mesh and rotate it, and I can code any specific mesh format needed to be used as an input.
What I mostly want is a tool that is easy to install for the final user of my program.
Almost every tool reads the .obj format, for example MeshMan, MeshLab and ArtOfIllusion. They all work under Windows and Linux. Geomview (.off-Files) is also great, but hard to install under Windows.
I'm using for this purpose osgviewer from OpenSceneGraph
I wouldn't know about the easiest tool, but have you tried Blender? It's cross platform.
There are some standard file formats for triangle meshes. Try outputing to .ply file and using one of the existing viewers for that.
I tend to use VTK file formats since I work in scientific visualization; that would be overkill for you.
In fact, I wrote a VTK/QT based app for viewing meshes that can handle .ply files https://github.com/HalCanary/vtkviewer.
Im writing a game engine and I'm wondering what 3D model format should I use/load/export? Obj seems universal and easy but it also appears to be unreliable in that most models out there contain errors and it doesn't store anywhere near as much as other formats.
There appear to be formats specifically for games such as MD2/3/5 but Im not sure, I use wings3d if I model, and I don't know what other details beyond purely loading what I need and support from the format Id have to implement, such as would I need to implement IK? and can I use scripted per piece animation rather than Inverse kinematics and bone rigging?
Collada is an open XML based format for 3d models owned by the Khronos group(OpenGL standards body)
From the Collada.org FAQ:
The COLLADA 1.4.x feature set includes:
Mesh geometry
Transform hierarchy (rotation, translation, shear, scale, matrix)
Effects
Shaders (Cg, GLSL, GLES)
Materials
Textures
Lights
Cameras
Skinning
Animation
Physics (rigid bodies, constraints, rag dolls, collision, volumes)
Instantiation
Techniques
Multirepresentations
Assets
User data
Before worrying about what 3D formats you want to support, I think you should really focus on what features you are planning to implement in your engine. Write those down as requirements, and pick the format that supports the most features from the list... as you'll want to showcase your engine (I am assuming you are planning for your engine to be publicly available). You might even want to roll your own format, if your engine has specific features (which is always a good thing to have for a game engine).
After that, support as many of the popular formats as you can (.X, .3DS, .OBJ, .B3D)... the more accessible your engine is, the more people will want to work with it!
Collada is a nice and generic format, but like Nils mentions, it is not an ideal format for final deployment.
I use my own binary format. I've tried to use existing formats but always run into limitations. Some could be worked around, others where showstoppers.
Collada may be worth a look. I don't think that it's that good as a format to be read by a 3D engine. It's fine as a general data-exchange format though.
http://www.collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page
+1 for Collada. You may also want a custom native binary format for really fast loading (usually just a binary dump of vertex/index buffer data, plus material and skeleton data, and collision data if appropriate).
One trend in the games industry is to support loading a format like collada in the developer build of the engine, but also have a toolchain that exports an optimized version for release. The developer version can update the mesh dynamically, so as artists save changes, the file is automatically reloaded allowing them an (almost) instant WYSIWYG view of their model, but still providing a fully optimised release format.
support Collada well, and then supply good converters to/from the other formats (this might be the hard part). This will give you maximum flexibility. Take a look at C4 engine
Collada is great, but it lives more on the 3D app side of things. ie it's best used for transferring 3D data between applications, not loading 3D data from within a games engine. Have you looked into Lua? It's widely used in games because its a scripting language that's both ridiculously quick (perfect for games) and very flexible (can be used to represent whatever data you need for your engine).
I need to program a util for a 3d model. What i need to do is pass the 3d model to the util and have it extract multiple information. Things like poly count, size/scale (if applicable) and anything else i can grab. Then i need to take a screen shot of the model 8 times (45deg from 0 to 360). Maybe 16. Is there an app that i can use to extract data from the model and is there another app i can use to create the image? if so i can write a php script to do this all for me :) if not i'll post more question about specifics.
My OS is debian etch
the models will be any format. I may make it 3ds only or limit it to what the app(s) support. Or i may have another app to convert one format to the other and extract the data from that format.
I haven't tried this, but you could try 3ds2pov to convert your 3DS files into POV-Ray format, and then render with POV-Ray.
The 3ds2pov program is quite old, so I don't know how compatible it is with current 3DS files. The archive comes with source code so ought to build without too much difficulty on Debian.
POV-Ray itself runs easily on Linux.
nb: other 3DS to POV converters may exist. This one just happens to be the first one returned by Googling for "3ds to pov".
Your requirements are very loose and vague but most 3d engines should have the tools you need to create your custom utility. I would start by looking at Blender or the viewer tools from OGRE, OpensceneGraph and similar tools.
You can try this: Linux based A3dsViewer -> does 3ds to pov conversion.