3D Graphics Engine

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Fuzzyman wrote:

>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/