On 3/2/10, Alexander Gessler wrote:
Open Asset Import Library (http://sf.net/projects/assimp) is a sort of generic importer library for 3d models, it supports two douzens of file formats from various 3d apps, frameworks, games, such as 3ds, obj, Collada, x, md5, ... Project exists since 2008, is hacked on by a team of 5-6 people. I'm currently the main committer, always trying to keep things together.
Basing on the '3D Polyhedron' extension, the idea would be to integrate Assimp as model importer to get access to a wide range of formats. After importing, display a sort of real-time preview (in a separate window with OpenGL, maybe?) so the user can choose his preferred view point, lighting, whatever. When he's done, the model would be projected onto the drawing plane, converted to inkscape polygons and grouped together. Fancy stuff such as flat-shading and other things would be quite easy to accomplish. Also, Assimps development will surely continue, so format support might be improved in future (Diederik van Lierop pointed out that CAD file formats are mostly missing, also there's no support for Blenders native format yet).
Since the project idea originally comes from me, I thought I'd chime in give a little perspective. We've been talking about completely moving to Cairo for quite a long time, and yet we've made just first steps towards that goal. This project could be an interesting playground for our expansion into the world of GPU accelerated rendering *and* it would help those of us who do technical drawing and deal with all sorts of 3D data.
I know that Diederik was interested in outcomes of the project, but IIRC he wasn't sure if he could be a good mentor.
Perhaps what we need here is a person who has experience of Cairo programming. So I'm CCing Carl Worth in case somebody from his team would be interested.
This is probably not a top priority project, and there are things to be done to speed up Inkscape before dealing with GPU acceleration, but our project has always been more about doing what people are interested to do than what users really need :) (just kidding :)) So please give it due consideration.
Alexandre