I have now made or partially made parsers for the B3D, X3D and X file formats, which means that I am currently working on my actual thesis. Having only skimmed through the rules earlier, I found out that I need to pretty much be done with the thesis in just a little more than a week. Seeing as my time already was somewhat constrained, this will most likely mean that I won’t be posting anything here for at least 3 weeks or so.
Since last post I’ve been working on the MD2 and the X3D file formats. The MD2 format is a really neat, compact format designed for speed and ease of use, which made the implementation really easy. It was, however, not that trivial to extract the contents of the file. Seeing as I prefer not to a quick and dirty hack all the time, I wanted to make a binary reader which could read from little and big endian based formats and translate the contents into the format that the system uses.
The weekly summaries were harder to maintain than exptected, but there wasn’t really that much of excitement during the first week to justify a post.
This week I’ve worked on finishing the COLLADA parser, which I am pretty much done with. There are some tags that aren’t parsed correctly (i.e., not at all), but otherwise it is pretty complete. With some quick and dirty hacks I was able to take out the information needed to display a mesh (which contained submeshes) onto the screen.
Summary Technically, this isn’t a week that I really have been working on the project, but it is an important week nonetheless.
This week I made an initial project plan schedule, chose five formats to work with and created some folders and files in my Dropbox directory (it’s always nice to have a backup!).
My reasoning for choosing the formats that I have, is that they first and foremost can be exported by Blender.
Today I have begun working on my bachelor’s thesis, which will be about comparing different graphics (3D) file formats.
The initial plan is to create some kind of a parser for the COLLADA, MD2, MDD, XSI and X3D formats and then compare their strengths and weaknesses.
This is really exciting, as I now will be able to work on my COLLADA parser and extend it outside of just my spare time.