| VMRL humble pie [message #13707] |
Fri, 04 December 1998 00:00 |
Struan Gray
Messages: 178
Registered: December 1995
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Senior Member |
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A short while ago I rashly promised to investigate using VRML files
and external programs to work around the fact that IDL prints object
graphics as screen-resolution bitmaps.
First the good news: IDL's VRML files seem to be nicely
compatible with other software.
And the bad: So what?
I do most of my work, and all of my publication-oriented stuff, on
Macs, and found that despite a lot of hype about VRML as the wave of
the web future, there are not many programs that actually support it
beyond making pious commitments to do so Real Soon Now (tm).
Programs like Bryce and Infiniti3D which are widely used in the
world of multimedia (most notably to generate the scenery for
stab-em-up games called things like KomBat Karzel) are both currently
lacking VRML support.
CorelDraw 8 (tested on PCs) does import VRML files, and can print
them fairly nicely, but is astonishingly slow (and I speak as one who
shared Unix on a 680000 processor) and, more importantly, doesn't
render at anything like the quality that IDL does.
I looked at the CosmoPlayer plugin for Netscape, but couldn't get
it to print anything but blank pages. That said, it worked nicely and
was surprisingly fast at displaying 3D models with user interaction,
so if you can persuade your users to install a several-megabyte plugin
that only works with Netscape browsers, VRML *is* a nice way to
distribute 3D models on the web.
A friend of a friend told me that some hardcore CAD and/or
rendering programs support VRML, with good renderers and high-quality
printing, but since you need to be called Gates or Spielberg before
you can afford them they're not really a cheap workaround solution to
an IDL problem.
So my current solution for high-quality output from object
graphics is to generate a large screen image or off-screen pixmap, use
the Mac printer drivers to create an EPS file when printing from IDL
and then add annotations and the like with Adobe Illustrator. Since
this is roughly what I tend to do anyway with my conventional images
it doesn't seem too bad to do it with 3D stuff too.
For the future, the easiest thing would be to wait for RSI to
write a better printer driver. In the meantime, 5.2 adds support for
DXF files, which are fairly widely supported in the 3D graphics
community, but the documentation is, how shall I put it, "a business
opportunity for D. Fanning". From the perspective of someone looking
to share files with existing programs, 3DMF seems to be the obvious
choice, but after my VRML fiasco I'm not making any predictions.
Gaze on my works oh ye mighty....
Struan
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