Mesh Distribution Format

OpenGL Development JOGL Development
#1

I am currently working on a project that will eventually require skinned meshes and armatures. These are not terribly hard to implement in my program for the actual drawing, but the meshes will be artist created and I don’t want to have to write a modeler that is capable of exporting vertex weights and skeleton information. I’ve tried researching the common formats out there and none seem to have what I’m looking for.

I am wondering if there is a single format that can export:
vertex positions
normals
uv coordinates
materials/textures
vertex weights
initial bone information

#2

A few suggestions: look into the COLLADA format, the ASE format, and the .x (DirectX) file format. I believe for example 3D Studio Max should be able to export all three kinds of formats at this point. In systems I’ve worked on in the past, models containing bones have been exported from 3D Studio Max and imported into 3D renderers written in Java, I believe using the .x format.

#3

did you look at the quake model formats? you should do, if you need to load character models. there should be many examples out there.

#4

I looked at the quake format and, unless I found an old documentation of it, doesn’t have quite what I’m looking for since it seemed that animation was framed instead of skinned. I will probably be using Blender to make the models and it supports the md2, 3ds, and .x formats. As I said before, I don’t plan on using md2, and after looking at the spec for .x, I don’t really want to spend the time trying to make a loader for it. Thus I’ll spend some time looking for the specs for 3ds, but if anyone knows of where to get the latest version, a link would be great.

#5

The .x file format is pretty easy to parse; at least the limited subset which you might really need in your tool chain. I’ve heard that ASE is also easy to handle.