Meshin' Accomplished

Yeah I know, I'm the lamest person on Earth for using that title. But I don't care, I've succeeded too much today to feel anything but empirically chuffed. Despite cleaning up baby vomit at my Day Job, my time was devoted wholly to Synergy.

After working on the SynMesh and SynModel classes last night, I was keen to get a function running that could load in mesh data from some 3D model file format. After some research I eliminated the majority of options, including all formats without bone/keyframe animation, and all formats which aren't widely accessible. That is, not supported by a wide range of modelling programs. That left me with 3D Studio Max's .3DS format. Big surprise there.

Like all great things my quest for this functionality began with a google search, which lead me to a very useful tutorial. After some copying, pasting, and butchering of this code into a form suitable for my code, I began to, with breath guarded, integrate it into the cubetopia demo, replacing my hand-coded geometry information with SynMeshes loaded from a .3DS geosphere.

Some small tweaks here and there and BAM! Meshes loaded:

Trippin' Balls

I suppose it can't really be called `cubetopia' anymore. Perhaps gala would be more fitting. A number of issues were outstanding at this point. The foremost was that there were no normals! So I set about calculating normals upon loading each face. That lead to some interesting mistakes:

Really Trippin' Balls

After becoming friendlier with the concept of vector normalisation, I got this:

Find the Lightsource

After loading in a cube mesh, I discovered the reason for this bizarre lighting was that the meshes were inside out! So, setting glFrontFace(GL_CCW) I finally achieved a well rounded result:

Lo! 'Tis a Gala Night

Feeling very satisfied with myself, I was eager to push the code and see just how far I'd actually gotten it to work. Next was a model of a tree that I was working on once upon a time, and to my delight it worked straight away, giving a pretty funky result:

Styx

I began to notice a significant delay in loading the 3DS file, so I decided to see how much this delay scaled with input size. I needed a high poly model... and then I remembered a skull I was sculpting in zbrush once upon a time. This lead to a huge delay of almost 2 minutes to load the file. It was obvious where the hangup was: the obscene amount of debug info I was printing to the console and the log file. I commented those out and the delay was vanquished, which lead me to the final product for the evening:

Synergy's High Poly Flat Shading v0.00001

Each skull is ~50k polygons, so theres 400k polys being rendered there. It is both a milestone and a map of the steps yet to take. The most obvious next step is to implement Smoothing Groups. For instance, here is the exact same model rendered in Max with smoothing groups on:

The Next Mission

Big difference. So that's about it; excellent progress for 5 hours work, in my opinion. I hope to make the same leaps and bounds tomorrow, but we'll see...