Global Mapper v25.0

Is it possible to import 3d models?

kbellis
kbellis Global Mapper UserTrusted User
edited February 2014 in Elevation Data
Hello,

Is it possible to import 3d models in GM and if so, what are the requisites?

Thank you very much.

Kelly

Comments

  • JeffH@BMG
    JeffH@BMG Global Mapper Developer Trusted User
    edited February 2014
    Hi Kelly,

    3D model support is currently pretty weak, but I'm working on that. It's required adding a new mesh data type, so that was a little involved. Meshes are in recent versions, but they don't interact much with the editing tools yet. That will change as we broaden out the support, and also 3D rendering will get better as well -- texturing is currently underway. Currently, you should be able to get better fidelity with Collada (DAE) files, but the library that we use to do the raw loading supports other formats. Are there any that are more important to you? We're looking at STL, PLY, OBJ, 3DS and others, but will be swayed by user requests. Any other uses cases would be helpful as well.

    thanks,

    ~Jeff
  • kbellis
    kbellis Global Mapper User Trusted User
    edited February 2014
    Hey Jeff,

    Thank you for asking... and my first thoughts in response would be for you to check out the most popular model formats displayed at: https://sketchfab.com/ as that will give you a better overall response to which 3d formats are ones to be considered for inclusion. They accept a pretty wide array of models, textures, normal maps, displacement maps, etc. Of course I'd put in a nomination for native Blender files :)

    Probably more important than diverse modeling formats; GPU exploitation. Leveraging that kind of processing power into GM's 3d engine I'd place ahead of model format diversity. I'm am nowhere near being bright enough to write code, but have witnessed some truly amazing computationally intense graphics afforded largely from a beefy graphics card including ray traces - IN REAL TIME.

    Another thing you might be interested in looking at is Brett Casebolt's work on his Natural Scene Designer. I've been waiting over 18 months for his port to Windows of NSD Pro v6 - he's a Mac guy I think as the Mac version came out in beta about 2 years ago! And if there could ever be a marriage between BGM and Natural Graphics, an NSD module in GM would be massively awesome.

    Kind regards,

    Kelly
  • JeffH@BMG
    JeffH@BMG Global Mapper Developer Trusted User
    edited February 2014
    Hi Kelly,

    Thanks for the feedback. The Blender file format is supported by the toolkit we're using, and that's definitely on my list. It looks like the SketchFab site supports a similar array available to our toolkit -- there's definitely a fair amount of overlap. Some of the impetus towards one format or another is availability of models. We already had some Collada (.DAE) support, so I focused on that first. Plenty of examples to be found at the Trimble 3D Warehouse. We'll probably try to aim at a solid subset of popular formats as we move forward; adding new ones with the framework that we've built around our library is not hard; a lot of it is just bookkeeping (but of course then we need to find models and test a bit). The big thing there is getting the new mesh data type to work well with the other data types in GM (editing, export, etc.), and that's all part of the larger effort.

    Down the road, we'll be improving the 3D viewer. It's a bit new to me (well, a lot of GlobalMapper is), but things are moving along, and you'll start some seeing improvements in pretty short order, I'd guess. I'm not sure where in the roadmap we start to go after high-end GPU improvements, we'll be working on fundamentals first, and that will probably include better integration with the GM 2D window, editing support, and so on. And we certainly need to be faster.

    Watch this space!

    thanks,

    ~Jeff