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Subject: 
Question about DAT rendering
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad.dev
Date: 
Tue, 16 Apr 2002 04:22:51 GMT
Viewed: 
351 times
  
I've been toying around with a visual DAT editor/viewer for Mac OS X,
and wanted to know if there is supposed to be any kind of guaranteed
rendering order on commands within a DAT file.

Obviously paying attention to STEP commands would be important, but is
there anything beyond that?  I've noticed that other OpenGL based
renderers seem to reorder things to get transparent objects to draw in a
reasonable way, so I'm hoping that I can reorder things in the way
that'll get me the most performance through GL.

So anyway, so far the app is geared heavily towards doing BFC
certification on parts/primitives, although if you're brave you can also
do complete manual editing of the raw dat contents (always available in
a drawer attached to the viewer window).  I implemented a BFC mode
that's visually the same as L3P, but the main difference is that you can
simply click on polygons that you want to correct and then hit a key to
flip them, so you don't have to manually step through the file seeing
what each polygon is.   (OpenGL selection mode is a wonderful thing to
have).

One of the more useful features is that you can start out with a model
file, and click on a polygon and it'll select the line that represents
the part you clicked on.  From there, you can click on the "open part"
toolbar item and it'll open just that part in another viewer window.
Then from there you can click on a polygon and select the line it's
from, and if it's from another part open that one up, etc.  There's even
a toolbar command to insert a BFC INVERTNEXT line just before the
selected line (very convenient).  I've found that for simple parts I can
do a first pass BFC certification on a .dat file in about a minute.
The one thing I need to implement is highlighting part lines with bad
matrices (with one one all 0's) so I can fix those as part of doing the
BFC certifications.

There are some things that I've found to be tricky to deal with, such as
degenerate quads that should really be triangles (mostly caused by
having an extra point along a straight edge).   What I've done (so far)
is try to detect those cases and just nuke the extra point and replace
that rendering command with a triangle.  Are there any
opinions/suggestions on how to deal with that sort of thing for real?

-Ken

Kenneth Dyke, kcd@jumpgate.com (personal), kdyke@apple.com (work)
  Sr. Mad Scientist, MacOS X OpenGL Group, Apple Computer, Inc.
    C++: The power, elegance and simplicity of a hand grenade.



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: Question about DAT rendering
 
Ken, We are obviously in the same area the moment. After completing the conversion of LdGLite to run under MacOS 8.6-9.2 (ie LdGLite (Mac)), I turned my attention to the two biggest dissapointments to me, namely slow render speeds and quirky shading (...) (22 years ago, 16-Apr-02, to lugnet.cad.dev)
  Re: Question about DAT rendering
 
(...) Err, not really. (...) Nod, you should be able to reorder without running into trouble. Steve (22 years ago, 16-Apr-02, to lugnet.cad.dev)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: winding check tool
 
(...) To check a file for BFC'ness, see (URL), question "How do I check a file for BFC Compliance?". To make a file BFC compliant, I recommend using LDAO's Editor. It includes a tool to change the winding for the currently selected line(s). My (...) (22 years ago, 15-Apr-02, to lugnet.cad.dev)

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