I’ve been really loving Panda3d so far though from time to time I’ve run into a few issues. I assume that’s because I’m running the latest development builds.
Based on the documentation, it appears it’s possible to load .dae files, but I can’t get that to work using the latest nightly package for Ubuntu (Trusty Tahr). What do I need to do to get Collada support in?
Once again, great work on Panda3d; it’s nearly exactly what I need. I’m not really a C++ developer, but I’d be interested in helping out on the Python side of things (especially if we can get Python 3 functioning).
Based on my browsing it looks like fcollada was discontinued in 2008, which explains why it is becoming more difficult to support. I don’t know if they included the 1.5 standard in it before they dropped it. It might be worthwhile to look at switching to a more up to date library. There is a BSD licensed python library, used by blender, with very recent commits. It does depend on numpy though.
I apologize for the late response… I’d assumed that I ticked the box “Notify me” but apparently I hadn’t.
Thanks for the heads-up. I have looked at pycollada, but I suppose I’d still have to load that into egg format manually?
Based on a cursory Googling of the available 3D model format loaders, assimp looks promising. Is there any work slated for a unified asset importer like that to be added? Seems like it would give massive flexibility while requiring the least amount of work for the Panda3D developers. Like I said, my C++ is pretty rusty, but my Python is great. With a little direction, I might be able to use Panda’s Python Egg API and the Python bindings for assimp to put together a proof of concept there.
I wrote an assimp loader for Panda a few years ago. It is in the repository, you just have to build it. It loads straight into Panda’s own structures so it is not bound by the limitations of .egg.
Last time I worked with it, its COLLADA support was limited, though.