Re: Common Objects

Neophytos Iacovou ([email protected])
Sun, 28 May 1995 22:57:57 -0500 (CDT)


Mitra writes:
>
> > 2) The author needs some way to contort the various common objects
> >into their system separately. http://vrml.org/generic/teapot.wrl and
> >http://vrml.org/generic/fancyteapot.wrl are going to be colored
> >differently, have different sizes and orientations, etc. However, it
> >might just be sufficient to express color and size preferences on the
> >whole WWWInline node.... thoughts?
>
> I guess we might need transforms on the defaults, that gets messy and might
> mean that this construct has to be replaced by something that looks like a
> group, or Switch node but picks the first of the nodes it can do. This was
> part of the reason for my message yesterday about "Scale", without scale
> its hard to know how to scale the generic teapot into the space.

I can see why Mitra wants a way to control the Scale of an Inline node.
It makes sense to me. BUT, I don't see how you can control something like
the color (for example) of an inline. It works fine for something like:

fancyteapot.wrl

But what if I have:

car.wrl

Where my car is composed of multiple objects, each with their own color?
Do you want to overide the color of the car's body, the tires, the
windowshield, etc etc, with 1 color?

I think that all you can really do with Inlines is to change their scale,
tranlate them, rotate them, etc etc. Geometric transforms work. Sure, you
can place a car upside down, but hey, chances are you wanted to place
it upside down?

Well, what about the car, what if I wanted to paint it all RED? True,
this is possible, you might want to do that.

I think I gave myself something to think about. Maybe you do give people
the ability to repaint the color of the whole car red, and if that gets
them into trouble, tough.

I think parsing VRML just got tougher than it already is.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Neophytos Iacovou Distributed Computing Services
University of Minnesota 100 Union St. SE
email: [email protected] Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA