Art of Illusion compatibility with Xith3D

Engines, Libraries and Tools Xith3D Forums
#1

Very briefly - I have managed to get art of illusion models imported into xith3d - and wondered if anyone had any experience with some issues I am having:-

  1. I’m using the new dawn obj loader - which seems to work fine, but the names of the objects don’t seem to be transferred over. I was hoping to create multiple objects in a scene, then identify them and manipulate them (i.e make them appear and disappear) as need be. i.e. getName() returns empty.

  2. I’m exporting the whole scene and generating an mtl file - but the rendered xith3d scene has some wierd artifacts that aren’t visible in the aoi scene. I realise that there is a difference in the rendering - but wondered if there is a way to make aoi more closely represent the xith3d equivalent.

  3. I was hoping to use some of the aoi texture and material generators - but it seems that really only images are supported. Does anyone know if anything else will work? Sorry to be so vague on this…

Cheers
Andy Stratton

#2

The generators in AOI don’t get transferred into the mtl file (at least I don’t remember seeing them in there). The names of the objects “should” get transferred if they’re actually put into the .OBJ file.

The newdawn OBJ loader should come with source from what I can remember was pretty simple and light, you could also check it and change it :slight_smile:

Kev

#3

i have mods to AOI that will save individual obj’s as separate file. Can’t upload at the moment fer some reason will try again later and tell you where to find it.

#4

Thanks for the offer of the individual file save. Does it do more than the standard single object export? I’ve used that before - though I can’t remember if the materials worked.

Cheers
Andy

#5

Basically I have modified the obj exporter to generate N obj files for N objects. One gotcha with AOI is when you duplicate an object it is given the same name (10 Cube 1’s). My solution was to generate sequentially numbered objects and an assoicated .ext file which contains the object name, location, bounds etc. So opening boolean1.ext contains info related to the object Boolean 3, its bounds etc.

name: Boolean 3 bounds: Box: {-10.0, 10.0} {-4.539179048177993, 5.460820951822006} {-8.729053659903073, 11.270946340096929} coords:Vec3: -24.926546382539637, 3.4374913548318395, -24.12610571059229 rot 0.0 0.0 0.0

in the loc below is a zip (aoi3.zip) containing my current (rough…rough…) source for the obj exporter and an Entity tool. also a jar to stick in the AOI plugin directory.

http://hawkwind.home.mindspring.com/

What this gives you is an additional obj exporter accessable from the export menu entry (watch out there are two now, the original and mine, use the first)

The entity tool is what makes this cooooll. Under the tools menu is now an Entity entry. Select an object and then select tool->entity and an entity object is added. If you double click on this a Bout based dialog appears containing all of the obj specific flags I set in my game…mod as you see fit

I use this to say things like “circle 2 is a light switch and is pickable and turns on PointLight 3, has comment 113, uses sound blah.wav etc”

A lot of the unique attributes for an object can be configured in this way…game specific of course

When you export the scene you get N obj’s, N .ext’s and One Entity file containing all of the data. and a manifest file identifying the list of obj files.

Put in the jar, create a small scene, export it and look at whats produced.

A bit rushed at the moment so i can expand on this later.

#6

Hawkwind
Thanks for the obj export code - the attributes part looks really useful - but I haven’t got that far yet! I hope to be able to use it later…

Cheers
Andy