#3D Exchange Standard
2 messages in this thread
Actually, Swivel is a real bear of a format. It's inane. At the lowest
levels, it still bears traces of its origin in Forth, such as storing X, Y, and
Z in one place, and Z, Y, X in another. Since all of the Swivel data is in the
resource fork, we have already developing a library of portable subroutines for
reading them, so I'm not afraid of handing the resource fork side of
MacroModel.
As for the 3DWorks animation format, please, if you ever get a spare moment,
"easily inspect" the files and tell me what everything means. 🙂 With that,
we'll be able to read and write entire scenes, instead of just 3DGF.
We did use that MacroModel source code from Rix as a starting point, of course.
But that code is another example of the sorts of program-specific 3D data that
makes a least-common-denominator standard difficult… few programs have
those same concepts. There's a landscape-like data grid object type in there
too, isn't there?
[Sorry for delay… found this in my outbox when I got back from vacation last
week.]
Hi John,
There's no resource fork to a MacroModel file… it's designed so the same file
can be worked with on either platform.
For 3DW, there's the header (refers mostly to location of geometry), the tail
(describes where the playback head is in the Score, selected cells and stuff),
and the body (combination of keyframes and traits for specific objects). There
are a number of extra arguments for spline interpolation and reserved words,
but those are minor frequency… main elements are quickly discerned, even
though it's not documented. But to what use would you put it?
Yes, true, a Bezier mesh is uncommon today. The Working Plane is a geometry
aid, not a piece of a model that would be exported.
Next message: Swivel itself hasn't changed since 1990 or so, when work started
on the Paracomp Modeling (PMDL) engine that became MacroModel. I don't know of
any differences in it over the years… Specular, Ray Dream and Adobe run it,
and I'm sure others do as well.
Regards,
John Dowdell
Macromedia Tech Support