Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

Now that RawKee has reached its 1.0 release I’ve been contemplating its future.

RawKee currently supports most X3D nodes that were also part of the VRML97 spec. In addition it has partial support for the HAnim spec (very nice actually) and partial support for the upcoming RigidBodyPhysics and IODevice components of AMD2 as well. As of release 1.0.2, we even have nice installers for versions of Maya 6 thru 7 on the Windows, OSX, and Linux operating systems (Special thanks to Mike Miscevic - http://www.miscevic.ca/). The RawKee plugin is available for versions of Maya on the Windows operating system back to version 4.5, though I’m not sure how much longer I will support versions of Maya prior to 6.0. That’s the general overview of RawKee 1.0.2 plugin as it stands now.

So where does it go from here…

...unfortunately, any further development here at NDSU probably won’t happen for quite some time. I’m guessing as with many other open source projects, it’s been taken as far as it needs to be for the purposes of our projects. The budget here at NDSU also no longer allows for continued development.

So I’ve decided to develop a commercial version of RawKee, and formed a company to do so, Flickertail Interactive, Inc. (http://www.flickertail.net/). Don’t misunderstand me, RawKee as an exporter will always be open-source and freely available. Every new export feature added to RawKee will always be available in the open-source version, even if we someday get into Shader, Particle Effects, and Nurb export. What I have in mind is the addition of non-export features. Or more accurately, I hope to use RawKee as the basis for a level editor for Immediate Mode Interactive’s (IMI - http://www.imilabs.com/) Cosmic game engine.

At this year’s Game Developer’s Conference in San Jose (GDC2006), I was very excited to see IMI’s Cosmic Birdie video game on display at the Sun Microsystems booth as part of Sun’s rollout of its Project Darkstar server system for gaming. To be honest, I was most excited about the fact that all the content in the game was created as X3D models within Maya and exported using RawKee. Shawn and Chad Kendall of IMI actually have contributed in a significant way to the development of RawKee by requesting features and providing bug reports. In fact, it became obvious after testing by Chad that my initial implementation of HAnim export from Maya was not friendly to the way in which animators normally animate their characters. Certainly there was room for improvement in that area. With Chad’s input, the HAnim tools in RawKee were greatly improved.

As far as actual code development goes, the plugin will be updated in the following order:
1) Clean up the code base and document it, which hopefully will include some user-friendly tutorials
2) Fix issues with X3D primative export
3) Implement all X3D nodes in the Interactive Profile
4) Implement a UI for Prototype node creation
5) Improve HAnim, IODevice, and RigidBodyPhysics export
6) Implement export capabilities for Particle Effects, Nurbs, and Programmable Shaders

Lastly, I would like to see one of the current X3D browsers become the previewing application for RawKee content. I’m up in the air as to which one would work best. It would have to operate in all three major operating systems - WinXP, OSX, and Linux. Right now only Xj3D is capable of doing so. But I really like the idea of working FreeWRL into RawKee. However, I’m still open to using any of the browsers for this purpose.

Well, that’s all for now. I will probably only make a blog entry once a month, so tune in next month.

Posted by Aaron Bergstrom on 2006-06-05 | Permalink