Chapter 8. External Models

In the previous chapter, the Utah teapot was introduced to demonstrate several shaders. Of course, we did not create the teapot by manually defining each triangle to form the shape of a teapot. Papervision3D allows us to work with models that are created and exported by a 3D modeling program, which adds many possibilities, especially when the shape of the default primitives doesn't fit your needs.

With Papervision3D we can load several types of 3D models. Some of them support animations that have been created in the 3D modeling program. There are many programs that support the model formats Papervision3D reads, more than what we can cover in this book. We will have a look at the following three:

• Autodesk 3ds Max: One of the widely-known commercial 3D programs, which runs only on Windows

• Sketchup: A free 3D modeling program provided by Google. Designed to be a more intuitive 3D program, which runs on Max OS X and Windows

• Blender: An open source, platform-independent...