New potential user saying hello

General Discussion
1

Greetings,

I’m in the process of searching for an engine (C++ preferable) that I can use in a number of projects I have planned. Thought I’d say hi and try and get a feel for the Panda3D community (something I take into account when deciding on an engine).

I have programming experience in C/C++/Java so would hopefully be able to contribute to the community. I have 2 opening questions you can hopefully help me with:

-What are the strong and weak points of Panda3d?
-What’s the deal with this model format it uses? I’m very much used to just using .X

Matt

2

-What are the strong and weak points of Panda3d?
Strong -
stable, tested, used in commercial games especially if using target old hardware
friendly community, get most questions answered fast.
great and well designed api
documentation

Week -
is not geared for new hardware, complex shaders and multi pass.

.X is directX preparatory format. Yeah many people use it. Egg i think was design when x was not widespread. Egg matching panda3d features very well. Egg has clear translation to BAM - which is a compiled Egg format that loads really fast.

3

Thanks very much treeform.

How user-friendly is this model format? What time of animation does it support and how do I convert?

4

I believe much of that information is located in the manual as well as some information on conversion toolchains. I don’t think there is an existing x–>egg converter, but I know Blender can import x files and can be outputed in egg format.

5

x2egg is an excellent x -> egg converter, and is shipped with Panda.

In many cases, you can also simply load an .x file directly, without bothering to convert it first; Panda will internally invoke x2egg to convert it on-the-fly.

David

6

Oh that is nifty! Does panda do this with any other formats?

7

What about the mis-typed second part of my question, what type of animation does it support? Bones?

I use 3ds max for modelling, I assume there is a good exporter?

8

Oh well egg supports a lot of things:
nurbs curves,
stencils,
instancing,
LOD,
empties,
collision geometry,
shape keys…
The problem is do the current exporters support all those.

Also the manual isn’t complete for C++

9

to answer the actual question.
panda support bone based and morphtarget based animation. (armature,skeleton,vertexanimation,shapkeys are all synonyms for the 2 mentioned above). there is a max exporter (i cant say how well it works since i dont use max).
there is an exccelent blender exporter, and i think maya is really well supported too.

in case you hit a modelformat without an exporter/converter you can write your own one. the egg files are straight forward.

10

Note that the keyframe (morph) export doesn’t really export animation for the blender exporter. Not sure about the other exporters. But if I remember correctly the egg format supports it.