On 20 Oct 2000 22:02:07 -0400, rev### [at] therectory (Rev. Bob 'Bob'
Crispen) wrote:

>Yeah, but I thought Warp's compressed mesh format was also binary 
>compressed.  Was I mistaken?  I'm embarrassed to say I haven't looked at 
>it yet.

No, it's a text format. That's why Chris Colefax's macros can read it.

>The .wrl file format is for Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML).  
>It's a text format (to be specific, UTF8).

I know, I've played with it a little.

>The original question was, unless that bad acid is kicking in again, can 
>you convert from POVRay to VRML?

And the answer is that you can, but only meshes.

>If it turns out Warp's compressed format is actually text and lets you 
>specify coordinate arrays, coordinate indexes, and indexed arrays of 
>vertex or face normals, than I'm the one who doesn't know what's going 
>on, and it should be miles easier to convert from that format to VRML.

Warp's compressed mesh is just what you described - vertex
coordinates, normals, vertex & normal indices and then UV coordinates
(if necessary), all in plain vanilla ASCII.

>As to using a cylinder to project an image on in VRML, I've seen it done 
>on the Mars Rover images, and it was awful.  You get all the slow 
>download speed of bitmap graphics *and* you get crummy looking 
>rendering, because VRML has got to project the bits into the viewing 
>plane of the browser, which is invariably at the wrong distance and at 
>the wrong angle for them to show up very well.  Or will be, as soon as 
>the visitor to the VRML world moves.

Just an idea anyway. I never said it would work like a charm :)


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] usanet
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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