convert-mesh

Creating Meshes for Omega
-------------------------

# Meshes #

Omega renderes entities with webgl via three.js which
uses its own json format for meshes.

An exporter plugin for blender is provided here:
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/tree/master/utils/exporters/blender

On Fedora I placed this in the ~/.config/blender/2.64/ directory

The Vegastrike game ships a bunch of freely available meshes and textures
which may be imported into blender and converted to the three.js format.

On Fedora I downloaded these via yum:
# yum install vegastrike-data

The meshes are bxfm files located in the /usr/share/vegastrike dir

To convert:
- copy locally (important!!!)
- run: /usr/libexec/vegastrike/mesher ./foo.bxfm foo.obj boc
  where foo.bxfm is the mesh you copied and foo.obj is the destination
  obj file to write
- open blender and file > import foo.obj
- save the blender project
- file > export into three.js format (requires plugin above)

# Textures #

Vegastrike textures are in the 'dds' format (even though they
have a png extension)

Simply copy the file locally to foo.dds and run
$ convert foo.dds foo.png

This also works for cube-based texture sets:
$ convert foo.cube foo.png

# Compressed Textures #

three.js now has support for compressed textures so dds files:
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/2348

The latest development version of ImageMagick has
support to convert png files into dds files as well:
http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23946&start=15#p102574

# Using #

Edit which meshes and textures are used in
site/source/javascripts/omega/config.js

# TODO #
 - Direct blender BFXM import script based on:
   https://svn.code.sf.net/p/vegastrike/code/trunk/vegastrike/objconv/mesher/from_BFXM.cpp