CompuServe Messages

Hi Tim, Glad you pulled Bill Allen in on this… the magazine's a great resource. And nobody's done more work with file formats than John Foust… cool. There are VRML docs on the web… believe it's through SGI's home page… but I haven't hit them yet. Suspect it would be structured similarly to OpenGL but I know next-to-nothing of practical use here yet. Will Macromedia read/write 3DMF? Odds are strong, but there's no formal announcement of future tools yet. When Escher (code name for QD3D) debuted there was a list of companies which would "support" it, but the nature of that support was rather on the nebulous side. <g> Seems to be three levels of possible support: read/write of 3DMF format; utilization of system-level rendering (restricted to PowerMacs in initial release); and deeper use of the QD3D API. Until the rubber meets the road, the file format itself is pretty much what anyone can reliably work on today. RIB's a great format, but I'm not surprised most tools don't read it. For one thing, desktop 3D apps largely are unable to make heads or tails of higher-order geometry. Look at the market — the majority of affordable tools are restricted to polygons. RenderMan was designed to work fastest with spline-based datasets. Most desktop 3D apps would be incapable of reading the standard RMan geometry definitions. The reason most developers cite for not importing RIB is the surface definitions. Again, current desktop technology is the limiting factor: texture maps (invented by the president of Pixar, btw) rule the roost, and the few procedural surface apps don't support the variety of function calls found in the RenderMan Shading Language. Between geometry and surfaces, I'm not surprised that DXF is the lingua franca and RIB is reserved for export, if that. Something I was thinking of when writing the last post — but didn't include for fear of going off-topic — is similar to the above RIB/DXF format comparison, except it's in the realm of plug-ins. Example: Macromedia's FreeHand 5.0 reads and writes Adobe Illustrator plug-ins as a subset of its own native plug-in format. Illustrator's plug-ins are modal — they'll bring up a dialog, you do your work, then later see the results upon the page. FreeHand's plug-in format is non-modal… you can interactively draw on the page while using the plug-in… in fact, you can even have these plug-ins drop into FreeHand's own tool palettes, like a VBX would. The FreeHand plug-in format is richer. But… which will third-party developers go for? The pressure will be to market in the least-common denominator format, for widest possible market share. Some will take advantage of the advanced features in the higher-level format, but it's the DXF/RIB issue all over again. What does this mean for the 3D plug-in development community? Will the least-common denominator rule here too… will plug-ins be hobbled by the desire to reach the largest number of animators? (Rhetorical question I know, but…. 😉 Regards, John Dowdell Macromedia Tech Support PS: Just read through the rest of the thread… synchronicity w/Syndesis! <g>