Re: [x3d-public] Re: [www-vrml] Google Sketchup (person edition is free)

[Alan Hudson <giles@yumetech.com>]

Chris 'Xenon' Hanson wrote:
> Sandy Ressler wrote:
>
> > Now that I think of it...wouldn't the "right" way to do this be to 
> > create an XSLT transformation that maps between KML and X3D?
> > Someone want to whip that out ;-)
> > Sandy
Likely XSLT would not be a good choice as you may need to do some math 
to convert things, and XSLT is horrible at math.
>   All horizontal coordinates in KML are in geographic WGS84 and vertical 
> coordinates are meters I believe. It's kind of a messy way to store 
> data, actually.
I agree its messy and not particularly expressive.

>   My company just finished writing a KML exporter for our Visual Nature 
> Studio landscape visualization software. (Alan -- you can ask Frank how 
> much fun THAT was!) I can tell you that KML is a difficult and 
> restrictive file format to work with, much more so than VRML. I can 
> attest that a KML to X3D XSLT translator would be very unpleasant.
My read of the documents was it wouldn't be too hard to convert.  Ie the 
format itself is relatively limited.  The one mismatch was the per 
coordinate specification of Geolocation.

I think we can just slap all the data into a GeoCoordinate node.

LookAt -> GeoViewpoint
Coordinates -> GeoCoordinate
LinearRing -> IndexedFaceSet using a GeoCoordinate
Extrude -> Extrusion(heaven forbid) or just an IFS

<tessellate> is a more interesting problem.  Not sure X3D has a direct 
way to do this.
NetworkLink/url -> Anchor

--
Alan Hudson

President Yumetech, Inc.                               www.yumetech.com
President Web3D Consortium                             www.web3d.org
206 340 8900
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