Imagery 3 D User Notes

Imagery 3D v 0.1 A General 3D File to 3DMF Converter for PowerPC Macintoshes with Quickdraw 3D By Jeff Lewis Changes for v0.1.6 Added desktop thumbnails and removed the between file view delay. Changes for v0.1.5 Added STL stereolithography , and RAW files Changes for v0.1.4 Added better file type tests for Atari 3D2 format (thanks to Harman Smith for this one). Problems with 3DS reading mesh colour (could cause crash) and large meshes (>32767 faces or points) fixed (Thanks to Benjamin M. Hill for this one). Changes for v0.1.3 Added POL format. Untested since I can’t find a sample POL file. Bug in Wavefront OBJ code that causes the app to hang reading these files is fixed Changes for v0.1.2 Bad startup test which would stop the app from running on most machines is fixed Introduction This is the 0.1 version of Imagery 3D, a general 3D file to 3DMF graphics converter. As you can probably deduce from the “0.1” version, it’s not finished - and for that matter, it’s barely started, but I wanted to get this out so that people would have something convenient with which to convert file from the myriad 3D file formats into Quickdraw 3D format. Requirements Imagery 3D runs on Apple Macintosh PowerMacs or clones and requires Quickdraw 3D which is included in MacOS 7.5.5 and later, or can be obtained at <http://quickdraw3d.apple.com/>. A Windows95 version for Quickdraw 3D for Windows and for Direct3D may appear in the future, but I can’t say when or if it will. Warnings and Gripes Let me make this reallyclear. This is not a final or even complete program. A lot of error checking is missing both on my side and on QD3D’s side. That means that quite simply, you use this - you use it at your own risk. I can assure you with an almost 100% certainty that you’ll get crashes. However, at the moment, it’s pretty stable overall so I figured it was time to pop out a copy. There are two major problems with Imagery 3D at the moment. One is that it probably will not handle all features of any given file format. Simply put, 3DMF just doesn’t support a lot of things like animation and even some basic geometry forms. I’ve tried to compensate where possible, but I’m still working out the details. The other is that it is actually possible to use a valid sequence of QD3D calls, all returning successful status messages, and get a 3DMF file which can crash the viewer. Even using the debugging version of QD3D doesn’t show any problems, so it’s hard to fix this. That being said, I have to muddle through this the hard way which means this taking longer than I’d have liked. One other thing Wouldpeople please stop using text for 3D graphics files? I mean really - how many people actually sit down and type in a complete 3D model by hand? This is throwback to the old WordPerfect days when people felt they had to be able to manually edit the tags in a file. Build a modeller already and go binary. It takes way less space and is much easier to parse. It also for…