Any working export?

[torbeng]

I'm still trying to figure out a single working way to export a model from Vizard so I can edit in in other software. Here are my results so far:

• DAE: "some other transform type. Missing 1 children" is repeated serveral times on the console when invoking node.save(). All textures are intact, but no transformations I applied to the models are exported.
• 3DS: no textures are exported
• OBJ: No textures are exported, a material file is created without the textures, but transformations applied to the models are exported correctly.
• OSG*/IVE: No software I tried can import the resulting files - Vizard seems to use a custom transform type that no other software can read.
• FLT: No textures are exported, model is huge, software has problems reading the resulting files.

I also tried the optimize() method to flatten static transformations and apply them to the nodes directly, but that does not seem to have any effect.

Can you give me any advice on how to export a model I changed in Vizard so I can have both the geometry, transformations and the materials available for any other program? Will this feature be functional in Vizard 5?
Currently, all export functionality seems to be broken.

[Jeff]

Currently the supported formats to save to are OSG. This is typically used to save out and reload into Vizard later. How are you using Vizard to modify the model files?

[torbeng]

Thank you for your reply. I import lots of models of houses, scale them, arrange them to resemble a city for an experiment - these have to be arranged on the fly for the experiment to work.

I would like to export the city for presentation purposes or to try the same level with a different engine. But with the custom OSG files Vizard produces, it is not possible to load it in any other software.

Looking at the various ways in which the different exporters fail (I understand that these are unsupported - this should however be clarified in the documentation), I think it might not be impossible to make at least one of them work for the next release of Vizard.

I can think of many other use cases for a working export function - it's just good to have some interoperability. It seems like the only problem with the DAE export are the custom transformation type, which doesn't seem to be a problem in the OBJ exporter. The OBJ exporter has problems exporting materials correctly, which doesn't appear to be an issue with the Collada exporter. One working export plugin would make my life a lot easier.

[torbeng]

I looked further into this issue and the only thing that should be needed is a conversion of the Vizard-specific transformations to DAE-compatible transformations here: daeWTransforms.cpp line 284
Can I somehow do this myself with the SDK? Is there something fundamentally wrong with my idea to export scenes this way? Can you please comment on my feature request - is it realistic to expect this feature in future versions (maybe even the upcoming Vizard 5)?

[farshizzo]

Although it would be nice to export models from Vizard to other software, it's not a workflow that we've focused on, so we can't really recommend it. We provide the the save() command so users can access the built-in OSG functionality, however none of the plugins are very reliable when it comes to exporting, as you can see.

Is the model you are attempting to save out, loaded from an IVE/OSGB file with embedded textures? This might explain why most of the formats don't display textures, since there is no actual image file on disk. Even then, I don't think any of those plugins support saving models that contain multi-texturing, so that might be another issue for you.

The fact that Vizard uses a custom transform type isn't some fundamental limitation to exporting the model correctly. It's just that those plugins were never written to handle such cases.

You should look into the FBX or DAE formats. If either of those look promising, then I can look into modifying one the plugins to support properly handling custom transform types (i.e. Vizard transforms). This change would only be made in Vizard 5 though.

[torbeng]

Thank you for your detailed answer to my question. I would be very happy with DAE export in Vizard 5. We will be using Vizard5 as soon as it comes out if the export function is there. Thank you in advance for your help! Please keep me posted on your progress with the implementation.

[farshizzo]

I just submitted a patch to OSG to support writing unknown transform types for the DAE plugin. If it is accepted, then it will be included in Vizard 5.

[farshizzo]

In case you are still interested, the latest beta release of Vizard 5 should support saving custom transforms to the Collada format.

You can download it from http://www.worldviz.com/support/download