3D Graphics Engine

[Fuzzyman]

I've seen various references to 3D graphics engines - and it's a
little difficult to know where to look.

I would like (in the long run) to be able to create and explore 3d
worlds - so texture mapping, light sourcing or shading and mesh shapes
would be nice - but I *don't* need the quality of a commercial game
system. Collision detection etc would be nice too.

Platform for development (!) is win32 - so I would like an engine with
precompiled binaries and a documented python binding available. A
freeware object modeller

So far I've seen :

Crystal Spaces - undocumented python binding, no 'easily' available
installation package (I can't see it anyway !!)

panda 3d - only accepts 3d objects from a comemrcial app (?)

vpython - very basic !

soya 3d - still unstable (??)

Can anyone reccomend a 3d engine for me to 'muck around with'.

Regards,


Fuzzy

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/atlantibots/pythonutils.html

 

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Can anyone reccomend a 3d engine for me to 'muck around with'.

Didn't check it myself, but blender migth be what you are looking for....

 

[Mike C. Fletcher]

I've seen various references to 3D graphics engines - and it's a
little difficult to know where to look.

I would like (in the long run) to be able to create and explore 3d
worlds - so texture mapping, light sourcing or shading and mesh shapes
would be nice - but I *don't* need the quality of a commercial game
system. Collision detection etc would be nice too.

....

Can anyone reccomend a 3d engine for me to 'muck around with'.

Well, probably the most obvious omission from the list is Pivy (Python
Inventor/Coin bindings), but I'm not sure if Tamer provides Win32
pre-built binaries. My own OpenGLContext meets the (rather limited) set
of requirements (save for collision detection) as well, and does have
pre-built binaries (but it requires about 10 or 12 separate binaries).
Both of those are Inventor/VRML-inspired engines which can load (subsets
of) VRML97 scenegraphs. OpenGLContext is definitely the less finished
of the two, as the Coin/Inventor engine has been stable for... well... a
long time. Both engines let you write new rendering nodes in Python
using PyOpenGL.

Blender has a browser plug-in mechanism in which you can run
animations... don't know if they can use Python on that side, though,
I'd be surprised if they can.

Using a commercial VRML browser with a COM EAI engine is doable (Cortona
being the most likely candidate), but probably beyond a
non-professional's commitment level (we spent months and months of
development on integrating this solution into a multi-user environment
in a commercial software house).

If you find more/better options, please update this wiki page:
http://www.py3d.org/py3d_zwiki/Python3dLinks

Have fun,
Mike

_______________________________________
Mike C. Fletcher
Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
http://members.rogers.com/mcfletch/

 

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Blender has a browser plug-in mechanism in which you can run

animations... don't know if they can use Python on that side, though,
I'd be surprised if they can.

Don't know about the plugin, but blender is scriptable using python. You can
program games and the like.

 

[Fuzzyman]

[snip..]

If you find more/better options, please update this wiki page:
http://www.py3d.org/py3d_zwiki/Python3dLinks

Have fun,
Mike

_______________________________________
Mike C. Fletcher
Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
http://members.rogers.com/mcfletch/

Hmmm... There's lots of interesting things to explore here... too many in fact ;-)

Rats... have to do some 'research'.

Regards,


Fuzzy

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/atlantibots/pythonutils.html

 

[popov]

Can anyone reccomend a 3d engine for me to 'muck around with'.

You can have a look to Ogre: www.ogre3d.org.
Python bindings may not be up to date, but they should be at the first
official release (which should now happen in a not so far future).

 

[Lucas Raab]

I've seen various references to 3D graphics engines - and it's a
little difficult to know where to look.

I would like (in the long run) to be able to create and explore 3d
worlds - so texture mapping, light sourcing or shading and mesh shapes
would be nice - but I *don't* need the quality of a commercial game
system. Collision detection etc would be nice too.

Platform for development (!) is win32 - so I would like an engine with
precompiled binaries and a documented python binding available. A
freeware object modeller

So far I've seen :

Crystal Spaces - undocumented python binding, no 'easily' available
installation package (I can't see it anyway !!)

panda 3d - only accepts 3d objects from a comemrcial app (?)

vpython - very basic !

soya 3d - still unstable (??)

Can anyone reccomend a 3d engine for me to 'muck around with'.

Regards,


Fuzzy

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/atlantibots/pythonutils.html

Personally, I like Panda3d. As it's in Python, it's very easy to learn how
to use. Well, let me correct that. It's core is in C++, but you manipulate
it through Python.

 

[Fuzzyman]

You can have a look to Ogre: www.ogre3d.org.
Python bindings may not be up to date, but they should be at the first
official release (which should now happen in a not so far future).

On a brief inspection (bad, busy day) I couldn't see *either* python
binaries *or* prebuilt binaries at the site you pointed to.

On the other hand it looks interesting and so bears further
investigation.

Regards,


Fuzzy

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/atlantibots/pythonutils.html

 

[Alexander Rødseth]

"The Nebula Device" supports Python.

I tried v.1 some time ago, and I think it worked, but I abandoned it for
some reason.
Now v.2 is out, but I couldn't find much documentation for using it with
Python.

Here's the site: http://nebuladevice.sourceforge.net/

- Alexander

 

[Stuart Bishop]

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I've seen various references to 3D graphics engines - and it's a
little difficult to know where to look.

I would like (in the long run) to be able to create and explore 3d
worlds - so texture mapping, light sourcing or shading and mesh shapes
would be nice - but I *don't* need the quality of a commercial game
system. Collision detection etc would be nice too.

Platform for development (!) is win32 - so I would like an engine with
precompiled binaries and a documented python binding available. A
freeware object modeller

A full featured and well documented alternative might be
Java3D. Jython didn't exist when I last played with it, but
I see no problems with driving the toolkit from Jython rather
than Python. Java3D is available from sun for a number of
platforms, including Windows.

Can anyone reccomend a 3d engine for me to 'muck around with'.

I think it is a good alternative to 'muck around with' as it is
high level and documented. It might even be a good options for
writing real applications with (When I last looked at it, you
would get a slight freeze every 30 seconds as the JVM's
garbage collector kicked in. This was a few *years* ago though,
so this might now be fixed )

- --
Stuart Bishop <[email protected]>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/
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[Tor Iver Wilhelmsen]

Platform for development (!) is win32 - so I would like an engine with
precompiled binaries and a documented python binding available. A
freeware object modeller

IRRLicht has a Python binding, you could try that.

IRRLicht: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/downloads.html

Venom: http://stenhard.net/download.php?list.6