hi,
i recently found panda3d, which seems to be a pretty good basis to build my project upon.
three questions i still need answered:
how integrates panda3d with Qt (www.trolltech.com, a platform-independent c++ gui-toolkit)?
i need to create big warehouses (about 600x100 meters) with a lot of shelves (about 500) and even more cubes in the shelves (about 2000) – how responsive is panda3d to handle rendering of that large worlds while the camera moves?
basically i only need 3 or 4 different cubes to create my shelves and the contents from – could i create them inside panda or do i need something like maya or blender?
there’s not much more requested then having a lot of shelves and a camera moving around and possibly picking cubes and replace them – but the opengl-lib i’m using is rather slow which such a large room because it renders everytime the whole warehouse, not just the visible part.
I don’t have a answer for the responsive-ness, but I guess I can answer your question according creating objects.
And the answer is “nes”. You can use Blender (using X-Exporter and X2Egg “translator”), Maya or 3DSMAX (both with egg-exporters- in the package of Panda3D) or other modelling software, but you can also use Panda3D to create your objects from scratch there. (there is a manual section around about that)
Panda doesn’t integrate with Qt per se. It creates one or more windows for handling the 3-D rendering; if you want to create 2-d widgets in another window, that’s up to you. But Panda won’t get in the way of your using Qt.
The responsiveness of your world depends on a lot of things; but in any graphics engine, you will have to be careful how you lay things out if performance is an issue. You will have to be conscious of how to arrange your scene graph so that the parts that are not visible can be easily culled. You will probably want to implement a visibility algorithm yourself to handle the decisions of which shelves you can see from any particular point on the floor. Also, you have to consider what happens if you allow your camera to get to a place where it can see the whole world (or most of the world) all at once–for instance, looking over the top of the shelves.
That being said, it is certainly possible to implement this world in Panda with a snappy responsiveness. But it’s really more your problem than Panda’s.