by Julio Jerez » Tue Jun 01, 2010 9:10 pm
No really, because serialized data is not general enough for what I have in mind.
In a nut shell what I have in mind is in moving Newton from procedural driven Physics modeling to Visual driven Physics modeling.
As is stand now, It takes too much work and skillful programmers to make useful physics modeling with Newton.
For people like You, Walaber, Dave Gravel, Sascha, Penumbra team, and few other that escape my mind now, modeling with the engine is not as challenging as it is for other people.
Most people after they pass the phase of making a standard Boxes, Spheres and Convex, they get stocked in limbo.
However many people do have a lot of creative talent but they cannot exploit because all the work it takes to implement what they want to do.
My idea is to create a format for a Physics modeling that is independent from the Physics engine.
it is like a Blueprint of a Physics model that includes place holder for Graphics, the rigid bodies, collision, and everything else needed to make the model.
The model will be saved to a XML format, so that anyone can recreate the Physic model by just parsing the format.
Or using a library that will allow to load the Physics model.
There will a Physics editor, which the Skeleton is already in 2.21 SDK, that twill be used to do the Modeling visually.
At first I thought of using 3dSMax, or Blender Plug-in, but Max is too expensive, and blender does not allow third party plug-in unless they are all written in Python.
I also thought of using Collada for the format but there are huge short corming in the Collada specifications.
so Collada will be used for importing and exporting assets to other modeling tools like Max, Maya, Blender, or others.
I have being writing many of the components for this tool already, the NewtonMesh, the dAnimation, the Collada Import/expert. Now its time to put them together.
My goal is to have a way for user to create high quality content, for their Games or Projects, and avoid many of the errors that keeps
happening over and over when each Physic constraction have to be created by manually by writing code.
When a person can make a model visually they can debug it visually.