I am trying to assemble a scene in opengl, using already made objects. The problem is that the object are in .max format and have no external textures. How could I import my objects in opengl, without retexturing them. I am thinking about exporting them to 3ds and using a 3ds file loader. Could you recommend one, and of course it has to work only with the 3ds file itself, no external texture files.
3ds max already allows me to export the file to obj. I have an object that has no external texture file, but it is already fully colored as a 3ds file. Is there any way to import in opengl and have the same colors, for the trunk, leaves?
You might want to check out lib3ds which will parse the 3ds binary format for you and give you access to all of the objects properties. I think Autodesk also has their own toolkit for doing this.
You should look at this link. It is a 3DS viewer with source code that renders using OpenGL. The code is simple.
Another option could be Assimp, an open source asset import library for C or C++, which seems like a pretty good way to get 3DS assets into an opengl program. It'd be especially useful if you want it for skeletal animations, and supports embedded textures. Though at this point, this answer may be less for you than it is for other people coming across this question.
If I remember correctly, the 3ds file does not store the vertex normals so you will probably have to calculate them yourself somehow or otherwise it will use the normal of the face itself which is will be quite ugly.
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I want to create a robot and want to move it in OpenGL. I will create the model in 3DsMax.
I was wondering about importing and moving it in OpenGL.
In which format should I save my file in 3ds Max so that I can import it in OpenGL?
Should I use pivots or save each part of the robot as a seperate file?
Does OpenGL support pivots?
OpenGL has surprisingly little to do with the answer. OpenGL is only used to draw your geometry. It is not a rendering/game engine/scenegraph in itself. Therefore loading a mesh and animating it is something you should take care of, subsequently informing OpenGL what it has to draw.
You can however make your life a bit easier by looking for OpenGL based rendering/game engines/scenegraphs out there that already provide the support you desire. But you'll have to take a look at that yourself. Then export your mesh in whatever suitable format your engine supports. OpenGL itself holds no relevance to whatever file format you wish to use. If you or your engine can deal with it and get all the relevant information out of it, you can use it.
Currently I have a 3D Cube that I drew by writing coordinates, that can rotate and move on a black screen.
Now I have a Model that I created in "3Ds Max"(It's a little backyard with high stonewalls, so I'm trying to use it as my world object.) and I want to load this model into my DirectX9/C++ project.
As far as I see in DirectX SDK examples this code is for loading .X model (which needs a plugin for "3Ds Max" to export that kind of extension. I'm not sure of this.)
Code for loading .X files into DX9/C++:
D3DXLoadMeshFromX( "Tiger.x", D3DXMESH_SYSTEMMEM,
g_pd3dDevice, NULL, &pD3DXMtrlBuffer, NULL,
&g_dwNumMaterials, &g_pMesh )
Is there a function like "D3DXLoadMeshFromOBJ(.....)" to load an Object? How do I load and render .OBJ files? 8(
Another question of mine is what is the difference between an .X file and an .OBJ file and which of them should I use?
AFAIK, DirectX does not support wavefront object files out of the box. You will need an external mesh loader for that purpose.
I can remember, that in the DX 10 SDK is a sample of how to load an .obj file, I think the sample is called MeshFromOBJ10. I don't know if it is of any use in DirectX 9.
As far as I know, the standard .x just supports basic meshes with no enhancements such as animation. If you want to try out graphical programming it is not bad, but if you are aiming for higher concepts you can later switch. I guess you can look up the advantages of the .obj files here.
It is always a good idea to create an abstraction for the input data you are using. For example, you could create a class AbstractMesh and an implementation XMesh deriving from it. Later on, you can than add other implementations like OBJMesh or anything similar.
I hope I could help you a bit :) Happy Coding!
Animation is full supported in x file format, and furthermore, it support fx files when you want to use shaders. A exporter plugin and samples you can download from this page:
http://www.cgdev.net/download.php
I am taking an OpenGL course and we have the option to create models to use in our assignments with a 3D modeling application, like Maya or Blender.
I am not looking forward to typing in coordinates manually so I was curious what resources I should be looking into for writing OpenGL code and importing models. (Textures are coming later). I am also concerned by the scale I'm importing at but maybe that's silly to worry about at this point.
Thanks for any resource suggestions. OpenGL has so much out there I get overwhelmed sometimes when Googling for what I need.
EDIT:
This is what I ended up using.
http://www.spacesimulator.net/tut4_3dsloader.html
I downloaded the "Windows" version and with a few path changes to the includes, got up and running. It doesn't handle OBJ files but rather 3DS. Cheetah 3D exports to this type as well.
Blender can save files in .obj format, and a simple google search turns up several libraries for loading this into OpenGL. Here is one.
One of the simplest formats that can be used to export meshes is Wavefront OBJ (please search for it on Wikipedia as I'm only allowed to post one link at the moment). It's basically a text file that shouldn't be too hard to parse.
Or actually, if you're allowed to use GLUT, you could try and use its loader (as answered in OpenGL FAQ 24.040)
Don't worry about the object scale at the moment, you can always scale your object later. Just make sure you export it with local coordinates, not global (e.g. [0,0,0] should be the center of the object, not the world you're modelling).
I'd suggest not worrying about the scale of the objects for right now.
Now, the thing you're going to have to do is settle on a format for the 3D file. There are MANY options when exporting from a 3D program like Maya or Blender.
Might I recommend attempting a simple COLLADA importer. Specification information is here:
http://www.khronos.org/files/collada_spec_1_4.pdf
Another spec I've been using lately would also probably be suitable for this is OBJ.
The specification for OBJ is located here:
http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/dataformats/obj/
Also, there are several free sample 3D OBJ files located here. This will allow you to see the format of the files and really see how easy they can be to parse.
Keep in mind, OBJ can not support animation, and it is rather inefficient for rendering large scenes.
I'd say that the Obj format is a good balance for readability and functionality if you want to parse it yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obj
The easiest way would to be to find a library to do it for you but the possibilities would be limited to your chosen language.
You shouldn't be worrying about scale. OpenGL's matrices can easily rescale vertices.
I am trying to develop a 3D game in openGL and i need to create many 3D objects.. I am a begginner in openGL.. I have tried with many 3D softwares like Blender , MODO, Unity 3D and Cheetah.
I am easily able to create my objects with these and exporting as Wavefront .OBJ, and converting it to a header file using a perl script. This header file is added to my openGL project..
The 3D objects are seen, but its not perfect. The script i used is to convert the .OBJ to .h using TRIANGLES.. And the object is seen with triangles. Its not full.. No way when i used TRIANGLE STRIP,FAN..? Problems with the vertices..
Is the problem with my Script or is it the wrong way i have gone..?? Or is there any other best ways to directly import 3D objects to openGL..??
The below link is the best one which you can get for 3D objects to openGL.. i got the scripts from these..
http://www.heikobehrens.net/2009/08/27/obj2opengl/
please help..
You don't want to go that way. Direct drawing mode (using TRIANGLE and friends) is extremely slow in OpenGL.
Instead, you should pick a decent format and write a loader for it (or use one found on the web). Good formats would be 3ds, obj if gzipped, collada.
Here's an example tutorial on loading from Milkshape files.
Once you load your objects programatically, you can use Vertex Arrays, or even better VBO's to display them. This is waaay faster.
Google for a mesh loader for your favorite format, or write one yourself.
I have written a reader/renderer for AC3D files that works fine on the iPhone (OpenGL ES)
Feel free to have a look at it here.
There is also an obj loader by Jeff Lamarche at google code.
AC3D can reduce the triangle count pretty good and as an alternative I ported QVis to the mac. My reader/renderer also tries to build tri-strips.
About VBO's. I have not seen any gained performance when using them in the iPhone. I'm not the only one.
I'm making a renderer using OpenGL. I have textured models in Blender / Sketchup (I can exchange between the two easily), and I'd like to be able to export those files into my renderer. My initial idea was to simply export the raw faces and render those triangles, but I'd like to easily slice my texture files into texture coordinates as well.
By that, I mean that my model faces get carved into triangles. You can see in this image (reproduced below) that my curve becomes 24 triangles. I would like to know what texture coordinates to use for each triangle.
Would a DAE file be the easiest way to do that? I've been reading the specs for the format and it looks easy enough. I think I could parse the XML and faithfully recreate the models in OpenGL. I'm wondering if there is an easier way (i.e. one that doesn't reinvent the wheel).
If you're comfortable with parsing the .dae-format, sure use it. However, if you're only interested in exporting textured triangle meshes I would consider using the .obj format which is much more simple to parse. From what I can tell both Sketchup and Blender can export this format.
If binary formats don't scare you, I'd suggest writing a Blender & Sketchup plug-in and exporting the geometry pre-baked into packed vertex arrays.
The beautiful thing about this method is that there's no parsing or type conversion in your app. Everything is ready to be sent to the GPU in simple contiguous memory copies. Great for static geometry.
A stripped down blender exporter looks something like this:
#!BPY
import bpy, struct
from Blender import *
self.fh = open("MyFileName", "w")
m = bpy.data.meshes["MyMeshName"]
faces = m.faces
for face in faces:
for (vertex, uv) in zip(face.verts, face.uv):
self.fh.write(struct.pack('<fff', *vertex.co)) # coords
self.fh.write(struct.pack('<fff', *vertex.no)) # normals
self.fh.write(struct.pack('<ff', uv.x, uv.y)) # uvs
self.fh.close()
If you wish to parse .dae files, i would suggest to look into Collada parsers.
.dae is actually the extension for Collada files, the latest effort from the Khronos group (maintainers of OpenGL) to have a single unified file format for 3D data exchange.
As for the existing parsers, here is what I've come across:
collada-dom, the reference implementation. As the name suggests, it is just an abstraction of the XML tree.
FCollada, a nicer abstraction. However, this project has been dead for almost two years, and, from what I've gathered, it is unlikely that we'll see any update in the future.
OpenCollada, a recent new effort. Haven't tried it, but there is an active community behind it.
That being said, if your only goal is loading a simple piece of geometry with vertices, normals and texture coordinates, going with the .obj file format might be a quicker way.
Any decent file format used by modeling programs (such as Blender or Sketchup) will include all information necessary to recreate the geometry you see. This should include the geometry type (e.g. triangle strips, individual triangles, etc), the vertices and normals for the geometry, the material properties used, and also the textures used along with the appropriate texture coordinates. If anything is lacking from a potential file format, choose another one.
If you think that parsing XML is simple, then I hope you're planning on using existing libraries to do this, such as expat, Xerces, or some other language specific implementation.
When considering import/export, first try to find an open source library that can handle the import for you and make the data available to your program in a reasonable format. If that's not available, and you must write your own importer, then try to find a simple ASCII (not XML-based) or binary format that fits your needs. PLY might be suitable. Only as a a last resort, would I recommend trying to implement an importer for an XML-based format.
There's also:
Lib3DS - http://www.lib3ds.org/
LibOBJ (won't let me post link)
You should take a look at:
http://sketchup.google.com/community/developers.html
The sketchup team provides a C++ COM server for free. Using this, you can get access to lots of information about a .skp file.
You should be able to use this COM server to write a .skp importer for your application.
You should try to get the .tlb file if you can. This will give you access to smart pointers, which will simplify your importer (COM client)
I used the version 6 SDK (which included the tlb file). The current version of the SDK does not appear to include this file.
Someone posted a solution (for the missing tlb file) on the developer forums:
http://groups.google.com/group/su-sdk-fileshare/topics