Positioning a texture on a generated 3D object?

[Hatonastick]

Apparently anim8or's file format is ascii and sounds more like a programming language:
http://www.anim8or.com/resources/an8_format.txt

However although you can make models with it, and there's at least one game "engine" that imports its file format, I think it's in some ways more of a renderer than a modeler.  I guess you were talking about more of the more "standard" formats though.

[Kitty Hello]

Anim8or can export (perfectly) to 3ds, which can be converted (with animations) to ddd. Baggi does that a lot.

[Hatonastick]

Will it convert if it's just an object with a texture (no animations - hmm I think I've answered myself towards the end of this paragraph)?  Because I've tried and I can't get it to work.  I've made my object in Anim80r, added texture, then exported as 3DS.  However when I come to importing it into GLBasic, instead of converting it, Convert3D flashes some sort of error message which quickly disappears before I can read it.  Now the thing is I can convert the 3DS object and texture file which AC3D generates using the same tool without any problems.

I might be doing something wrong somewhere - I have great faith in my incompetence when it comes to 3D graphics.  I've tried both the preview version and the current stable version of Anim8or.    Hopefully Baggi can give me some pointers/suggestions as to what I might be doing wrong.

[Kitty Hello]

Upload the 3ds file that causes problems. I'll try to fix the converter.

[Hatonastick]

I'll zip it up and email it to you.  As well as the animator file and texture.  This forum doesn't allow uploads right?  And I don't have access to a file server these days (can't be bothered mucking about with the public "free" ones).

[Kitty Hello]

There's a bug in my 3ds converter. Great, I found it.
Now importing Anim8or models works. You should reduce the animation frames to the bare neccities, though. (Your model has 100 frames).

[bigsofty]

Don't write ddd. If you want to write a converter, use the dda format (http://www.glbasic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=334) and then (optionally) convert this with a small GLBasic program:

Code (glbasic) Select Expand

X_LOADOBJ name$+".dda", 0
X_SAVEOBJ name$+".ddd", 0
ENDThere's 2 reasons for this:
1) The ddd file format is very, very cryptic but small in size
2) The ddd format offers you to "protect" your models against importers (sort of. X_GETFACE still works, though)
3) Somtimes I make changes to the ddd format, so you would have to keep up with it.
4) a bad ddd file might break your game, there's not much error checking in the read_ddd function.

Aha, .dda, an interesting read, thanks Gernot

[bigsofty]

Here's a new kid on the block... just announced today... and freeware

http://lodka3d.googlepages.com/indexeng.html

[Hatonastick]

I'd love to know how or why my model had 100 frames.  Ah well I guess if I do use Anim8or I just run the model through Milkshape afterwards.  Milkshape seemed to create a much smaller 3DS export file - probably minus the extraneous animations.

LODka 3D looks interesting but waaaaay over my head.

Gernot I redid the object in Anim8or from scratch.  The 3DS export converted into DDD format is now a tiny 7k as opposed to what I had before (140k or something I think it was), so hopefully I've fixed whatever I accidentally added last time.