[Fiware-webui] 3d asset formats and containers revisited

[Kristian Sons]

Hi Toni,

some comments from my side. I put Felix and Jan into CC because they 
might know better some of the current states.

- Felix had a student working on a glTF loader plug-in for XML3D [1]. 
However, I don't know what parts are supported
- We don't have POP-buffer support in XML3D currently
- We will define a standard binary asset format based on BLAST
- There is a new Blender exporter for XML3D. It's a little private 
project I run. It exports assets already. I will add support for binary 
assets as soon as we support it
- The main difference between BLAST and glTF is the structure of the 
scene that is given for glTF but arbitrary for BLAST.
- For the   <mesh src="myscene.gltf" /> approach, you have no way 
changing anything inside the scene, that's why we introduced assets 
which allow to override arbitrary data within the referenced scene.

Best regards,
   Kristian

[1] https://github.com/xml3d/xml3d.js/pull/72
[2] https://github.com/ksons/xml3d-blender-exporter


> Hi,
>
> I unfortunately can't make it to the weekly today (am driving a car
> then) but there shouldn't be urgent matters as things were clear with
> the webtundra&synchronization bundle last week already (as Henar noted
> earlier it already was published in the FIWARE Lab's catalog etc - I
> somehow didn't see it in the list when had checked earlier).
> Documentation in the fiware catalog entry should be improved still
> about how to instantiate the blueprint etc. but that we can only
> really do when it works.
>
> Here however a brief heads-up of further 3D-UI roadmap work, based on
> what we discussed with Tommi, Adminotech's CEO some days ago:
>
> The Recommended Asset Pipeline was already a major feature in earlier
> FIWARE 3DUI work:
> http://forge.fiware.org/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/fiware/index.php/FIWARE.Feature.MiWi.3D-UI-WebTundra.RecommendedAssetPipeline
>
> In the WebTundra 1.0 release we support two alternatives, as described
> in the manual: three.js's JSON for small assets, and Chronos's glTF
> for efficient binary that's fast to transfer over the web & load to
> the GPU -- hence good for large objects or scenes.
>
> Also, there are the POP-buffers from Fraunhöfer for which DFKI has
> added support to XML3D.js and also created the BLAST container.
>
> Long story short: we now plan to re-evaluate the situation and
> continue the work to get a good solution. Meshmoon has business
> interest for an efficient format & loading code, currently they don't
> support any of these techs yet but only the less efficient and
> otherwise rarely used Ogre formats.
>
> Options include continuing with glTF, possibly by adding support for
> POP-buffers there for progressive loading & level-of-detail (LoD), or
> adopting BLAST. Like BLAST, glTF also supports any compression for the
> geometry binary so I think POP-buffers should be possible to use there
> too. BLAST I don't know too well yet so studying it, and also the
> current status with regards to glTF support out in the world is how
> this work would begin then.
>
> We haven't scheduled nor allocated people to this yet so this is just
> a pre-info that this is planned to appear in the roadmap once get to
> that.
>
> Additionally, this work will include design & implementation of some
> kind of good mapping between these scene asset bundles & the realXtend
> scene model. Currently we can say this in WebTundra 1.0 and it simply
> becomes a single entity with a Mesh component -- the hierarchy from
> the glTF scene JSON is not dissected to individual Tundra scene
> entities etc:
>
> <mesh src="myscene.gltf" />
>
> Actually when CIE added support for COLLADA asset bundles to the C++
> Tundra back in the days, we already got the design for this which is
> perhaps fine to reuse here:
>
> <entity>
> <mesh src="myscene.gltf#car">
> </entity>
> <entity>
> <mesh src="myscene.gltf#bike">
> </entity>
> <entity>
> <mesh src="myscene.gltf#house_at_street_x_y">
> </entity>
>
> (that xml3d notation for a realxtend scene is a bit fake: in xml3d the
> rex entities are actually <group> and not <entity>, but I use the
> entity term now in the email here to keep it more familiar to
> realxtend folks)
>
> That's one way we can use asset bundles for efficient downloading but
> still point to the individual assets in the Tundra scene level. This
> allows for example live collaborative editing of the scene normally as
> the individual asset references can be changed in the component
> attributes and hence get synched over websockets etc.
>
> We don't need to link to the asset bundle explicitly as AFAIK it works
> fine to load the bundle as a kind of side effect from the first
> reference to it (for additional references we then need to note inside
> WebTundra's Asset module that the bundle is already (being)
> downloaded).
>
> Looking forward to seeing how those things are on the BLAST side as
> well when get to that. Will read the docs and perhaps we can have a
> dedicated talk about this etc.
>
> Cheers,
> ~Toni
> _______________________________________________
> Fiware-webui mailing list
> Fiware-webui at lists.fi-ware.org
> https://lists.fi-ware.org/listinfo/fiware-webui


-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________

Kristian Sons
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, DFKI
Agenten und Simulierte Realität
Campus, Geb. D 3 2, Raum 0.77
66123 Saarbrücken, Germany

Phone: +49 681 85775-3833
Phone: +49 681 302-3833
Fax:   +49 681 85775–2235
kristian.sons at dfki.de
http://www.xml3d.org

Geschäftsführung: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff

Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313
_______________________________________________________________________________