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.
Related
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.
I have a file which contains a bunch of points with their x,y, z locations.I am looking for a simple viewer where in I can load this point data and view it .Rotation is essential for me to check the depth of the cloud being generated .Can someone point out a light weight viewer with minimum installation overhead for this?
I have used MeshLab and it worked well for me. IIRC it uses your average Windows installer.
You could also try CyArk viewer (a Java applet), or Leica Cyclone -- I haven't used either one.
Of course if your data format is not a standard one, they may not be able to read it.
R+ is an open source statistical program that I have used for this exact purpose. It can be accomplished in only a few lines of code.
First add the rgl and plotrix libraries.
Enter the following code:
pcd <- read.table(file.choose(),sep="",skip=10)
names(pcd) <- c("x","y","z")
plot3d(pcd$x,pcd$y,pcd$z,col=color.scale(pcd$z,c(0,1,1),c(1,1,0),c(1,0,1)))
Where pcd is the type of file (if I remember correctly), the first ten lines are skipped as they are a header (skip=10) and sep"" represents the delimiter used in the file. This last line of code plots the points and sets the color based upon depth.
I vote for Paraview. I am shocked that no one mentioned it before I did.
No matter which OS you use, Windows, Mac OS or Linux you can use it without any (big) problems. (You know software always has bugs)
Meshlab is good too. In fact you can convert file format easily to make sure they can be used in different software, if you can learn Python.
I do believe someones has already done it. Eg. .off (Meshlab format) to .vtk(Paraview format), like this one.
Update1:
Most visualization softwares are user-friendly, so maybe the problem you have is mainly about how to convert the source data you have to the specified format which can be used in these viewers. It may be helpful if there is an example of data you have.
matlab is a quite good tool to visualize your pcl, expecially for further analysis.
BACKGROUND
I am using a commercial application on windows that creates a drawing
This application allows only two output options: (1) save as a bitmap file and (2) print to a printer
the bitmap is useless for my purposes - I want the vectors
Looking at the print output (I sent to the Windows XPS print driver) it seems clear based on the amount of zooming I can do without loss of detail that the underlying vectors are being send to the print driver
Once I get the vectors, I will be writing some code to transform them for some other use.
MY QUESTION
Whart are my options for geting the vectors from the print? (am open to both commercial and open source)
OPTIONS I HAVE THOUGHT OF SO FAR
Take the bitmap and use a program like VectorMagick to. I have tried this approach. It does not produce the fidelity I seek even when the original bitmap is large. Practically speaking I believe that using any tracing approach will not give me the quality vectors I need.
Print to the Adobe PDF driver. This technically works. I have Adobe CS4 so I can print to it save the resulting PDF and then import the PDF into Illustrator and then export as some other vector format. The problem with this approach is money/licensing. I own a personal copy of Adobe CS4 - so this is fine for me. But I need to capture the vectors at work for business purposes - and no I'm not going to install my personal copy of CS4 at work.
Is there a "print driver" that captures the print output directly into a vector format? I have seen some commercial ones via google. If you've used them, I would like to hear about your experience with this technique. I could write my own and in that case do you have links to any existing code that I can start with.
If this is an ongoing solution you need then you might need to buy something or build your own. If it's a onetime affair you might look to use an 'older' Lexmark PCL printer driver. I'd recommend something like the T610. If you download the PCL driver and install it you can modify the defaults and change the Graphics option from XL or Autoselect to GL/2. This will force the driver to output GL/2 output which is vector (GL/2 is a plotter language). This might do the trick for you. Other printer drivers may have the abiltiy to force GL/2 (vs. Raster) but I'm not sure. I use to work for Lexmark and have used this before for a similar requirement.
Ensure you use the Lexmark 'Custom' driver as I don't think the Microsoft-based one support this feature.
...pausing while I investigate a few things............I'm back...
Another option is to find another GL/2 driver or build you own...I just took a few minutes to search the web and came up with a few other options that might work.
Build you own:
I've built drivers (minidrivers) using the Windows Driver Development Kit (DDK), it's quite simple to construct basic drivers. Looks like there is a setting you can set to enable GL/2 output: Enabling HP-GL/2 Vector Graphics Support (PCL-5e) in the GPD
Alternate drivers:
Depending on the OS you are on there is probably a 'generic' GL/2 driver built in. I believe XP has a Hewlett-Packard HP-GL/2 Plotter. You might need to check the license (as with the Lexmark solution) but it might work for you and as it's part of the OS there shouldn't be concern about using it. It's probably written and copyrighted to Microsoft
Keep in mind you will have to do some work to convert GL/2 to whatever output you want but it should be a matter of an simple translator to convert each set of commands. There may be tools out there to help. Here is a quick link to Lexmark GL/2 reference which might be enough to get you going, check out the GL/2 information under the PCL section: Lexmark Technical Reference Guide
Postscript:
The last option I have is to use a generic Postscript driver. Postscript should output the vector images as vector graphics in the Postscript but my knowledge of this is limited at best.
Output:
If you need the output to route to file you can set the port to FILE: which requries user intervention, or install something like Redmon (or connect with me and I'll send you our port monitor that allows for automatic output to file).
Hope this helps in some way.
My favorite is the open source (GPL) PDFCreator
http://sourceforge.net/projects/emfprinter/
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 want to write an app that takes in a model filename via cmd line, create a list of stats (poly count, scaling, as much as possible or maybe the stats that i would like) and to load the model with its textures (with anything else) and draw it from multiple position to save the images as pngs.
How would i do this? are there utils i can use to extract data from models? how about drawing the models? my server does not have a desktop or video card, would no video HW be a problem?
You can use http://www.lib3ds.org/ for reading the data, IIRC it also comes with a sample program that you could base your code on.
Have a look at the 3DS specifications at wotsit.org. AFAIK, there are no official specs. Another possibility would be to look for open source 3DS libraries/tools and use them.