[ODE] integration with cal3d?

[Royce Mitchell III]

Hello Nate,

Saturday, January 10, 2004, 2:11:35 PM, you wrote:

> On Sat, 10 Jan 2004, Adam Moravanszky [Novodex] wrote:

>> I think the main problem is actually not the programming part but
>> rather the fact that no free authoring environment exists where one
>> could easily rig skinned characters with the extra stuff needed for
>> physics, like masses, joint limits, and bounding boxes.

> Is that a hint?  :-)  

> Anyone know where I could find some code to import and render .3ds meshes?  
> Juice would then be not be too far from what Adam describes.  I've been
> wanting to add mesh support for a long time, but Juice development has
> slowed to a crawl since I went back to working full-time.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lib3ds/

We used lib3ds for prototyping in our game, but eventually had to rip
it out, and put it in an "exporter" utility, because it takes too long
to post-process a 3ds into something game-renderable. ( 3ds stores
normals per-face, instead of per-vertex, like OpenGL wants ).

I would be happy to share the code I wrote that interfaces lib3ds, and
makes the conversions, but as another e-mail has suggested, this
format may not be sufficient. However, for this new editor, you may
want a 3DS importer, at least. On caveat, is my code doesn't import
all the information, but it would be a starting point.

One of the biggest things I'm struggling with right now is the lack of
such an editor, so if you were going to embark on something like that,
I would be happy to do what I can to help. We won't be using Cal3D,
because ODE is going to control our objects all the time, but we still
need a way for our 3D artists to attach physics attributes to the
models.

So, let me know what I can do, even if it's just beta/crash testing.


--
May you always find water and shade,
 Royce
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