RobynsVeil opened this issue on May 30, 2008 · 267 posts
renderdog2000 posted Sat, 07 June 2008 at 12:48 AM
Quote - GIMP/GTK? Heh - you ARE a masochist, aren't you? :)
(kidding! Err, almost.)
Yeah - the whole texture switcheroo thing is what I was getting at as a major obstacle. You get one or the other, but not both... and no app alive can make another app do both (at least not without an SDK and a metric shedload of exposed goodies in it to facilitate such things).
ROTFL... Dale! You bastard -I forgot all about the invisible mystery bone! :) I guess I hadn't seen one in so long...
I agree that FaST couldn't hurt to have its own file format. Then again, hell - FBX and COLLADA are open, and they both have very generous specs as to what kinds of stuff you can store in them. D|S originally built the .daz binary format because 1) .obj is too limited, 2) .3ds sucks to write for (in addition to being almost as limited as .obj), and 3) there wasn't really anything else at the time that filled the bill, unless you wanted to pay some corp a ton o' cash for the privilege of writing to theirs. But... back on the first hand: with your own format, it's hella easy to read-in and write-out your own files, your way. Call it sixes?
Renderdog... a LOT of what you're describing is already present in D|S (insofar as Poser compatibility), but they stopped well short of direct export of .pz3 files outside of testing- and I haven't seen anything reliable come of anything in that direction last I checked (this may have changed, but I'm not holding my breath). Pose, Char, Lights, files like that... no prob. But strangely enough, .pz3 (the entire self-contained scene-in-a-bucket) is a royal screamer to construct - at least in a manner that can be consistently read-in to Poser. That is, unless you use Poser itself to write it. I wish I knew why that is.
/P
Lol.. actually I'm a lot more comfortable with GTK than I am with QT, in fact so far QT is presenting a host of issues that may well cause me to reconsider using it. While I've worked with the professional commercial version, the open source version seems pretty limited by comparison. So this might just become a GTK app from the ground up.
As to it's own file format, there are some things i'd like to be able to do that I'm not certain any other file format would take into account. For example, in Poser you can use the grouping tool to multigroup faces - however when you do the tool is still limited to only those areas defined by bones.
There really is no valid reason for this, yes you do need one set of groups to define mesh areas for the figure for bones, however you should be able to do an entirely different set of mesh areas for materials. While this gets kludged together in Poser, I intend to keep it seperated in FAST.
Actually I was thinking of going one better, I'm still reading up on some basic bone theory, however it occurs to me that you should be able to have two (or even more) entirely seperate sets of bones with different mesh groups for different purposes. Take a skirt, for example. one set of bones could be used to conform it to the figure, an entirely seperate set of bones could be used to move, bend and twist the mesh in various ways to fit the skirt properly for various poses. There is no reason why these two sets of bones need to be connected to one another, in fact they could very well be processed seperately by the program and still work just as well. It would certainly make rigging a lot easier if you had one set of bones for conforming purposes, and those bones were hidden from view and not considered when you started working with a seperate set for posting purposes.
I'm still reading through the collada format, if I can accomodate everything i'd like to do in collada I'd love to make that the native file format, but as it is I'm not certain that will be the case, so jury is still out there.
As to Daz Studio, it does have some nice capabilites, don't get me wrong, but it's not a Linux App and in order to get a lot of the functionality I'd like to have I'm stuck buying mondo plugins for it. That's all well and good, I have nothing against throwing a few bucks towards the coders for there work.
But aside from the fact that it's not a native linux app, the problem comes in when they upgrade from one version to another. Each time they upgrade there is a chance that whatever code changes they make will "break" the plugin your using, so you have to upgrade your plugin. Now, what happens if the author for that particular plugin abandons it and doesn't upgrade for the new version?
This of course is just one of the difficulties I see with DS, that and in all honesty I really dislike the interface, and it suffers from one of the same major drawbacks that poser does, it's rendering engine is just nothing to sneeze at.
So after really considering all the options I thought an open source replacement was the way to go, and there are so many possibilities out there for additional features it's not even funny.
-Never fear, RenderDog is near! Oh wait, is that a chew toy? Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...