Horde3D

Are Collada format 3d assets the only thing Horde3d works with?

Sorry for asking such a stupid question. It appears to me that Collada dae files are the only thing accepted at this time. I'm wondering if I'm missing something and that a non-Collada format is accepted, or maybe there are plans to add additional formats soon?

The reason I'm asking this is because I'd like to have some animated skeletal meshes/characters. I've been reading bad things about the animation and skeletal support in Blender's Collada exporter. I'm not looking to do overly complex animations and it seems that illusoft's exporter supports animations and skeletons, but I'm not sure. I read that it does some places and that it doesn't other places. Any updated information would be helpful. The animation thing is all that's really holding me back at the moment from picking Horde3d over the other couple of options I'm considering.

Thanks!

Currently Collada is the only format supported - and yes, the Blender exporter is flaky at best. It may work for a specific case, or it may not.

I have a couple more converters in the works, but given that this is finals week, I wouldn't expect to have anything ready inside of 2-3 weeks. If you have any suggestions as to formats that you would like to see, there is a development thread for this issue, feel free to add requests there.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Thanks for the response.

I've been tied to the Unreal Engine for years so I don't have enough experience with other open formats to really promote any particular one. As long as I can export animations, skeletal meshes, and regular meshes from Blender I honestly don't care what the format is.

The format that seems to keep coming up is FBX. I have videos sitting around that give the source code for an FBX importer that supports animations, skeletal meshes, and regular meshes, but I don't have a clue where to start when it comes to integrating/extending something like that into Horde3d.

Do you have a specification for the ASCII fbx format? I'm interested in getting blender to work, too. But I can't find the spec and it's not inside the FBX SDK.

And the FBX SDK can't be used for open source software...

There is an FBXConverter utility, which you can download from Alias' site. Since FBX and Collada support pretty much all of the same things, it allows you to convert FBX fully into Collada. Unfortunately, the ColladaConverter tool does not yet fully support the Collada output by the FBXConverter, so until someone reworks the converter, that isn't quite functional.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

just my 2 cents.

Full support for Collada 1.4+ and a more efficient run-time format (compiled Collada?!), should be the focus of our efforts. Pretty much all DCC tools have Collada 1.4 support or exporters, so that is a pretty good intermediate format. What we need in my opinion is a run-time efficient format for use inside of Horde3D.

However it is of note that such run-time formats are expected to be standardized in subsequent Collada versions. Hey if we make a good one who knows maybe our format can become the standard

We already have an 'efficient runtime format', in the form of .geom and .anim files. The ColladaConverter is just that, a method of converting collada files into the efficient runtime format.

As another note, as far as I can tell, our ColladaConverter conforms better to the standard than does the blender exporter, as has been noted by several other projects using collada.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Hum... So the problem is that the FBXConverter does not output standard compliant Collada? What about using Ogre or CrystalSpace exporter for blender... i think the CS is not ready (they are developing their own parser instead of colladadom or fcollada), and the Ogre one is also not 100% afaik.

Sorry if i am mistaken. I have to take a closer look at the code, but my understanding was that the geom and anim files did not support all of the Collada 1.4 features. Also i am not a big fan of having separate files for separate descriptions/objects anim and geom files (though it is standard practice), unless you can reuse them. While writing this I was thinking more along the lines of an m3g file format... but i must admit that i have not delve deeply into that part of the code.

OT: Can i apply an anim file independently from the geom? how does it extrapolate for missing bones? Also, is the physics part of the Collada 1.4 format supported in horde3D? I think it would be interesting to use something like http://www.physicseditor.com/features.shtml or at least reuse the code in our own editor, but instead of having to use the .phd format use the Collada physics format... So instead of having to add a phis file format, we should be able to have a compiled collada format. I hope i am making some kind of sense...

Anyway, i leave this for you guys to discuss, i am not at the tooling or framework development level. I am sure that people that are developing game framework (like slide) around horde will have a much clearer vision of the problem.

Unfortunately, the videos I have use the FBX SDK. However, they do go over how to import FBX data and then export it to another format or a custom format so that the FBX SDK doesn't have to be used to do everything. I don't know a thing about the geo and anim files that Horde3d uses, unfortunately, so I wouldn't know how to output data that can be useful here. It does seem that I have all the information necessary to load in FBX files and that would allow a converter to be built and kept as a separate utility. Would this be helpful?

I have described the .geo and .anim format here: http://www.horde3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1203#p1203
When I can load fbx data I can convert it. Should be enough.