If an authoring tool is not taking animation or
interactivity into account, it's not an authoring tool (IMHO), it's
just a modeler.
The geometry, appearance, and lights are not that complex.
X3D Interactivity isn't TOO difficult, although parsing and processing
ROUTES is more complex than other simpler
event models I've seen. But X3D animation can be a write-only process.
Take simple rotation for example.
If you want something to rotate (in other packages), you'd specify axis
or axes and rotational rate(s), or total number
of degrees to rotate over so much time. Not in X3D - you set up
key-frame animation, which would take some sort
of AI to grok into knowing that it was a simple rotation. Not that it
can't be done, just that yeah, it can be hard to take
to other formats/tools.
Dave A
Bob Crispen - The VRMLworks wrote:
The
voices are telling me Trevor Harmon said on 8/30/2005 2:09 PM:
There is a shareware 3D scene authoring tool
that I'm interested in, but it doesn't import or export X3D or VRML,
even though it supports 3DS, FBX, LWO, DXF, and a number of other
formats. I asked the tool's author about this, and he said that X3D
and VRML support is not planned because these formats are "very
complex." Can anyone comment on what it is about these formats that
makes them more complex than others? Thanks,
I've written over a dozen tools that generate VRML, and when you leave
animation and behavior out of the picture (which is what you'd do with
your average authoring tool) it's perfecly simple. The same would be
true for X3D. The guy either doesn't know what he's talking about, or
his customer base isn't demanding that capability in large enough
numbers to overcome his inertia..
The good news is that, with AccuTrans3D (cheap) you can convert almost
any kind of 3D format to VRML. AccuTrans3D is my current
use-all-the-time tool, but there's lots of other tools that do
something similar, and I list some of them on my website.
If you can get a trial, you might see which format converts most easily
to VRML. With most of the models I grab from archives, .3ds takes the
least amount of cleanup work.
If you think you're going to be going back and forth to the scene
authoring tool, you might find that a VRML and X3D specific authoring
tool might save a lot of time and aggravation. The only one of those
tools I've used myself is VizX3D, and I'm very pleased with it.
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