Writing importer is sort of like knitting: you have all the pieces already their, you just got to the work. It’s not the most exciting or challenging work, rather zen-like to tell the truth, but in the end you get something that looks nice. So since the weather was appalling the last couple of days, I added yet another importer to my app: LWO/LWS files.
A friend of mine once showed me a model of the International Space Station (ISS) in his 3D-development project and since NASA is kind enough to offer those files to the public, I thought I might have a go myself.
Publicly available information on how the file format is specified is a bit scarce/outdated but I managed to get the basic assembly information and meshes in, no cameras, animations, textures and so forth yet. It proofed a good exercise to do this as the files unfortunately contain a lot of defective triangles, duplicated surfaces, texture image paths are incorrect and so forth. I ran into multiple problems in my mesh iterator and triangulation code, things that have worked fine for months now. One problem I certain have to address is the Z-fighting issues I’m having due to the naive near/far clip-plane calculation I use. This model is way bigger than the other files I’ve used so the problem is much more noticeable compared to the car models. Well, there is always the next problem…
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