Trivial Import into panda?

Pipeline
1

Hi folks,

I’m a panda newbie and I’m going to use panda for outmost trivial animations: 2d animations of computer architecture diagrams (level of UML diagrams or Visio diagrams) (3d models will be a topic for later).

I would like to import/create the system architecture diagrams using Visio and/or other modelling tools. I’m quite fit in Visual Basic and much more in Python but I need some ideas how to approach the import of the diagrams into Panda.

How do I create trivial and simple objects like squares? With panda scripting and then saving as .egg?

Animation will be done with Panda scripts, then, of course.

I’m happy with any hint/link/short sample script you can give me… I promise to document the final solution then here… :wink:

My first thoughts:

  • get the data out of the diagrams (using Visual Basic, Python+ActiveX, whatever) into an intermediate format. The systems and relationsships in the diagram will have some IDs/names/character tags which identify the various systems and relationships (this is done with Visio and/or other tools).
  • write a framework script
    – which uses this data format to create the panda modell (s)
    – which creates sample panda python scripts out of templates which will include the named objects as python objects (?) representing the panda models to support fast animation scripting

Kind regards,
Andrew

2

For 2d work, look in the gui section of the manual, it should be what you are looking for. You can apply images to gui ojects without having to convert the images to any sort of egg foramt. If you really would like to make an egg out of an image, there is an executable egg-texture-cards.exe. It takes an image and creates a polygon egg file out of it, which can then be loaded as a model in Panda. To find out how to use it, you can type
egg-texture-cards -h

in the command prompt window