Hi, I've just gotten somebody's NeHe OpenGL tutorial ports for Android's OpenGL ES running in Android emulator. I want to get 3D animations into the scene.
I want to know what I am getting myself into. I'm a bit familliar with opengl. I did mess around with ogrexml in last spring a bit and from what I recall the format was somewhat understandable for me.
Do I need to be good in linear algebra for the skeletal animations?
My current understanding of the format is like this: there are bunch of points in .mesh, all points are sort of "linked" to bones and in animation move the way bones move. So far I have no idea how the the textures are applied.
I am looking the simplest, least time-consuming way to get my animations into the OpenGL ES scene.
Are there some ogrexml importers directly for OpenGL that I could port to Android?
What would be the best approach if I will decide to make my own importer?
Is there a specification for ogrexml format somewhere?
Are there other formats that You recommend me to use?
Do You know if there are some 3D engines for android that I could use?
Any other recommendations?
If you really want to use OgreXML in android, you should convert the XML into a binary before putting it into android. Some of the files can get really large in XML format and loading them on a mobile device will probably be too slow. What I would suggest is, load the model in jME2/3, then export the mesh/animation data in your own binary format. You can then handle it much easily on the android side.
I would not suggest writing your own importer, it's quite a consuming process and it's sort of a waste since there's one written for Java already, it works, and should have no issues being ported to the Java android uses.
All you need is the buffers (position, normal, color, index) for the meshes, the skeleton (bone hierarchy), and the animation data (bone tracks). All of this information is available at the end of any OgreXML importer, both jME2 one and jME3.
There are limited docs available on the OgreXML format, there are dtds for the mesh.xml and skeleton.xml:
http://ogre.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ogre/trunk/Tools/XMLConverter/docs/ogremeshxml.dtd?view=markup
http://ogre.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ogre/trunk/Tools/XMLConverter/docs/ogreskeletonxml.dtd?view=markup
The material scripts have more detailed, end-user, documentation, available here:
http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/manual/manual_14.html
Thank You! This is exactly the advise I wanted to get.