Nicholas Woodfield's Portfolio

"The best way to predict the future is to implement it."



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jMonkey Model Importer

The jMonkey Model Importer (jmmi) was a project I started and completed during my sophmore year in college. Back then I tinkered around with the jMonkey graphics engine and found tool development to be rather interesting (it still is!). There was also a rather distinct lack of GUI tools, so if you had to import 3D geometry you usually had to write some code. To my knowledge this was the only GUI model importer for jMonkey 2.x, but with the release of jMonkey 3, they've dedicated development to a whole SDK with an integrated environment, making this tool a bit obsolete now.

Nonetheless, I was satisfied how this project ended and a few people over at the jMonkey community found it useful. This tool was developed using Java Swing, and in the second release I included a tab view with a OpenGL canvas embedded in Swing to render the models after they are converted.

Features

  • Easy to use user interface
  • Single or batch file conversions into the .jme binary format
  • Supports multiple model formats (.dxs, .3ds, .obj, etc) including conversion options for each.
  • Real time 3D render of the model(s) complete with simple camera controls.

jMonkey Model Importer Screenshot jMonkey Model Importer Screenshot

Demo

This project is available via Java Webstart.

Launch the application


Note: I developed this with XP in mind, I cannot guarantee it to work on Mac or Linux (although no one ever told me it didn't!). If you're using Vista or Win7, be sure to set the output path to a directory that doesn't require administrator access to write to!

You can also download a stand-a-lone zip which includes the source code here.

DeleD DXS Conversion Tools

In addition to this tool, there is source code for my first version of the DeleD format converter (for .dxs files). After I finished this project I endeavored to create a much cleaner implementation of that converter. At around that time, an offshoot of jMonkey called Ardor3D was taking root and I wanted to support both platforms. So the new format converter was designed to be independent of either, although I never finished the project. It was also extensible where users could develop plugins for custom tags that could be added in the DeleD 3D Editor.

You can find the google code page here.


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