[x3d-public] Minutes of X3D WG Meeting Wednesday 23rd August 2017 [Public Release]

[Michalis Kamburelis]

2017-09-05 15:19 GMT+02:00 Roy Walmsley <roy.walmsley at ntlworld.com>:
> The section of glTF was noted. It was explained that glTF essentially
> contains a pre-defined scene, with a bit of run-time. The file is loaded,
> and then exposed to animations. It was agreed that this needs to be
> reviewed, especially as previous strategies were concerned with
> ExternalGeometry and/or ExternalShape candidate nodes.

Note that glTF can also have it's own animations, see e.g.
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Sample-Models/tree/master/1.0 .

I understand of course that if you want to use glTF only for
ExternalGeometry, you want to "limit" yourself to only extracting mesh
from glTF.

But, from an implementor (view3dscene and Castle Game Engine) side,
when I'll implement glTF, I will want to also read glTF materials,
animations and other information. One reason is to be able to use the
existing tools that deal with glTF. E.g. Blender's glTF exporter
supports animations
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Blender-Exporter , while
Blender's X3D exporter does not (no skinned animations or even simple
animations of transformations). In Castle Game Engine, when we'll have
glTF support, you will be able to use glTF in an Inline node, to treat
glTF as an X3D node graph (with multiple shapes, animations etc.).

This does not prevent *also* using glTF for "pure mesh" in
ExternalGeometry, of course. I just wanted to signal that glTF has
broader applications, and my implementation plans to "embrace" them :)

Is there a (public) information about X3D plans for ExternalGeometry /
ExternalShape? Googling I could only find
https://doc.x3dom.org/author/Geometry3D/ExternalGeometry.html , which
is a bit short, and it talks about Shape Resource Containers (the glTF
would essentially replace the SRC, as I understand).


> VRML to X3D translation
>

Note that view3dscene (Castle Game Engine) can already convert VRML 97
to X3D (in classic or XML encoding) :) You can use it from GUI ("Save
As.." in view3dscene) or batch mode. See
https://castle-engine.sourceforge.io/view3dscene.php#section_converting
for the details.

Regards,
Michalis