MeshMixer

[johnfredcee]

Presenting..the Mesh Mixer..

MeshMixer1.png

It's just a front end for the Open Asset Import Library http://assimp.sourceforge.net/ and it lets me sample files in all the formats (quite a lot) that the import library supports. The idea is that I'll be able to sample free art in various formats and save them out as optimized Ogre meshes, while first getting a preview. This is very much 0.01 at the moment (no bones or textures)..

It's LLGPL and the source is up at http://wiki.github.com/johnfredcee/meshmixer

[jacmoe]

I like that!

Ass imp.

Seems like a useful tool.

[Caphalor]

Looks great, I really waited for such a tool! Is "Remove redundant materials" == "Merge submeshes with the same material"?
And it would be nice if you could provide some binaries...

[johnfredcee]

Oh, the import library breaks the mesh up into per-material submeshes automatically: "remove redundant materials" just removes any materials in the file that aren't applied to any meshes.

Will get a binary out when I have texture support in ( in a week or two, depending on how much time I can snatch for development ) as it's not so greatly useful at the moment without them.

[betajaen]

Nice! I want.

[sinbad]

Interesting.

I'm slightly offended that Open Asset Import supports Irrlicht meshes but not our mesh format, which has been around much longer and is a lot more flexible. Oh well

[Praetor]

I've been dabbling with assimp for a while. Early versions had a lot of problem reading even slightly complex meshes. But they're coming up on a release candidate and it appears much much better. Very permissive license. We can always add .mesh support for them.

[johnfredcee]

I finally scraped together a binary release of this after a few updates to assimp and lots of tweaking with the UI. I'm still not 100% happy with the camera, but it's getting there: Windows binaries are here http://yagc.ndo.co.uk/code/meshmixer.zip. There are no installers, it's old school. Extract and run meshmixer.bat..

It still doesn't support bones or multi-texturing, so it's more of a preview than anything else.

[johnfredcee]

I've bumped up the binary again, with some camera related fixes. Here is what it looks like now.



All the mesh tweaking options are still present from the earlier screenshot on a notebook pane that is hidden in the screenshot. The new tree view in the screenshot lets you look into the internal structure of the file and pick out sub-meshes for viewing and export. It's a precussor to bones support. I'm begining to wonder if this should actually be a standalone app or merged with Ogitor.

[steven]

I would love to help you add it to OGEd (on which I am working right now).

(Or else I will integrate Open Asset Import myself later )

[liberator]

Very nice tool. I have integrating this library on my todo list as well. perhaps you can separate the project into 2 parts:
- Ogre adapter (import/export using the Ogre format as the main in memory format)
- GUI

I think a lot of people would love to have a generic adapter for this library which allows us to load assets into the Ogre format (great for development time testing).

[jacmoe]

Liberator, I think you misunderstand: MeshMixer is using AssImp.
It's got an even better license. Use that directly.

[liberator]

I admit I did not look at the code and just downloaded the binary (short on time atm) but are you saying that the assimp library already supports loading into the ogre internal format? Because that is what I'm talking about.

[jacmoe]

It's not rocket science. Just look at the sample ass viewer.
But, of course, John already did all the work in MeshMixer.

[nullsquared]

Looks extremely useful. I was thinking of doing something similar, but it's so much easier if someone else has done it already . Excellent stuff!

[johnfredcee]

I would love to help you add it to OGEd (on which I am working right now).

(Or else I will integrate Open Asset Import myself later )

I will have a play with OGEd: it would be nice for MeshMixer to find a home..

[jacmoe]

No offense to OpenGameEngine people, but hardly anyone knows about that OGEd editor. Yet.

Choose Ogitor instead!
A lot of people have interests in it, it's powered by wxWidgets and Ogre. An editor plugin would be nice.

(Points to Addons Forum/Ogitor).

<edit>
This is by no means exclusive: a plugin for both editors would make everyone happy.
It's just that Ogitor has more public momentum.
</edit>

[johnfredcee]

This is by no means exclusive: a plugin for both editors would make everyone happy.
It's just that Ogitor has more public momentum.

This is probably the best solution: to split the mesh mixer viewer and parser, and make the parser some kind of shared library for others to use. I don't have access to a Windows box at the moment, so the next binary will be a Linux one, though..

[jacmoe]

Anyone using Assimp in their own projects?

Any progress on the MeshMixer?

I've been fighting to get AssImp to parse animations, but whatever I do, it reports 0 animations and 0 bones...
Can't really see what I'm doing wrong.

Anyone used AssImp with animations? Succesfully?

Bob is now textured, but he refuses to animate:

[jacmoe]

Solved: Don't use the aiProcess_PreTransformVertices postprocessing flag.

I'll post some screenshots when I've successfully imported animations.

[dudeabot]

interesting, let us know if you have done progress with the animation thing, this library looks very cool =)

[jacmoe]

Right now the code is a total mess and nothing works (yet), but I succeeded in creating a skeleton for the assed mesh.
However, Ogre crashes when loading it because there's something wrong with the vertexassignments for the bones in the mesh.

I'll let it cool off a bit, and then rewrite it completely.
That should take care of all problems!

But it's promising.

[jacmoe]

AssBones.png

[dudeabot]

this library would be very nice on Ogitor for example, importing assets from various formats and converting them to .mesh on the fly =)

[jacmoe]

That's the idea - but since this is the MeshMixer topic, I hope that John appears to pick up the improvements.
But this is definitely going into Ogitor, when it's ready.