Shockwave 3D

[J]

this is not a comparison at all - it can't be anyway, since sw3d is outdated (directX 7) and is aiming at web-3d needs.

BUT:
the 3d engine which is part of macromedia director 8.5 (and above) is built by intel and has very good design and structure. they have some nifty functions which might be nice to have in tv:

meshA->interpolateTo(meshB, 10);

moves meshA 10% towards meshB. very handy for chasing purposes.



extrude3D(somePath, extrudeDepth, bevelWidth, bevelType);

extrudes a flat path to a 3d mesh with optional bevel (rounded or flat). for cool 3d text effects for example.


there might be more, but i haven't looked at every single tv function yet! so taking a look at this shockwave 3d engine can't hurt - it's VERY slow compared to current engines but the concepts behind are very thoughtful imho.

[jviper]

I must ask you, when those functions are called within shockwave3d, how fast are they?
That extrude3d function sounds like it actually manipulates geometry. How fast is it? If you called it multiple loops in a row, how many loops would it go through per second.

If the answer is "slow", then anyone could write such function, hince the reason why it wouldn't be needed in TV3D, because I could write a function that could do it, you could write a fucntion that could do that, anyone could.
Now, if those functions are executed in a reasonable amount of time (like 1-1000th of a second), then the question is, what is different between shockwave3d and TV3D, that allows shockwave3d to do such a thing faster than TV3D can. If shockwave3d has an advantage that would combrusome if implemented in TV3D, then there is no need for it. Again, in that case, one could just do somthing to increase the speed of it, wiether it be going into ASM or writting thier own shader to do it.

But the first one: Interpolate function, that just sounds like a manipulation of the position, and problebly wont take much to do the calculation. You could problebly just write your own function for that.

[J]

the geometry building functions in shockwave 3D are pretty fast, you can do mesh animations with them. but as i stated sw3d is not comparable at all to tv! it's directX 7 and it's almost 5 years old. and it's integrated into director's scripting language 'lingo' which is way slower than any languages used with tv.

i don't think 'you can write a function yourself' is an argument: enough knowledge assumed, you could even write a whole engine yourself, but having complex prebuilt functions makes life easier and development faster. sure, everybody can write a simple 3d extrude function, but when it comes to rounded bevels it's not so trivial anymore..

so the point is that i just wanted to show a thought-out 3d-API which could lend some nice ideas to tv!

[gg]

I used shockwave 3D for previous version of the tool I'm building now. Lot of good things, only major disadvantage I encountered was the load time.There was a nice plugin that enabled you to change things in real time (like color, position of objects etc.). This could be handy plugin also for TV
gg

[Juce]

I did some pretty cool stuff with Director a few years back and it was a great primmer for 3D engines.  One of the best things was it had an exporter from 3D studio max.  You could make all of your art, multiple meshes, lights, parent child hierarchies.... and they would get exported into Director.  Then all you had to do was call those assets by name and apply functions to them.  Is there any way to export an entie scene for Max and have TV open it and grant acces to each model within the scene?

[jviper]

Presently, I don't think you can. You would have to load the scene in as a .x or .tvm, and then you would have to destinguish each mesh in the scene by verticies and indicies. This would be very slow.

But soon, I think (in TV3D6.5), there will be a new filetype called .tvs, for Truvision3D Scene. Once that system is incooperated into the engine, then I suppose eventually there will be a converter from the 3ds Max Scene format to the .tvs format.