APOCALYX is a...

free Game Engine based on OpenGL (MAIL) (SITE) (FORUM) (BLOG)

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Cal3D models (II)

The visitors of the APOCALYX Blog have chosen again. This time the choice regards the improvements of the animated model formats supported by APOCALYX. The list in order of importance is the following: MD5 (13), Cal3D (10), X (4), MDL (3), MD3 (2), MD2 (1), MS3D(1), Other (0).

Cal3D models from the "Cally demo"

It seems that the APOCALYX users want to adopt in their games mainly MD5 or Cal3D models, then X and MDL follows. Probably MD3 or MD2 are too old to be still interesting, while MS3D models require a commercial tool (MilkShape3D), so it's not so useful for amateurs.
At the beginning of the poll, MD5 took immediately the head of the competition. Then someone have commented that Cal3D is a very nice model format, especially because it is supported by Blender, the well known free modeller. Immediately Cal3D regained a better position in the list. Finally, X and MDL come. The latter is another very old format, but compared to MD3 and MD2 is more advanced because it is based on skeletons, while the animations of MD3 and MD2 are vertex based.
Users, that regularly visit this blog, knows that I like very much MDL models. That is true only because there are a lot of MDL models available and I can find a lot of them good for my demos or games without searching too much. I'd prefer Cal3D, of course, because more advanced, but I can't easily find good models in this format. As I said in a past post, I have found only the three that you can see in the screeshot above. They are too few to put together interesting demos. However, if a modeller wants to donate some of his Cal3D models for my free demos, they are welcome!

2 comments:

Alexander William Grace said...

Well, since your going to have MD5 models, how about doom3 levels too? You could get source code for rendering and loading the levels from the DarkRadiant Project:

http://darkradiant.sourceforge.net/

Please respond.

Unknown said...

TaoistProgrammer said...
> how about doom3 levels too?
> You could get source code from...

Thank you for the suggestion!