On Wed, Oct 5, 2016 at 4:28 AM, Chris St Pourcain <
chrisstpourc...@indigomolecularimages.com> wrote:
> Bob,
>
> One package that does support the high-level objects and could import
> everything was Blender, but that now seems to mess up when it tries to
> import the new vrml files exported from JMol. A simple ball & stick model
> of oxygen gets imported as a sphere within a single cylinder. Something
> more complex like a cartoon representation of 2D1S.pdb is just imported as
> a single sphere. Other models like a simple ball & stick of dopamine fail
> to import into Blender and trigger a series of errors, but again MeshLab
> imports all of these fine. Blender used to be able to import all of these
> models properly.
>
> I realise that software packages able to import vrml and x3d files are
> quite temperamental, and what one imports fine another fails with, but I
> guess what I'm wondering is whether the vrml file format that doesn't use
> high-level objects has changed so significantly that Blender can't now
> import it.
>
Figures.
<rant>
I am very displeased with what I see in the range of 3D printer software.
There's this "standard" called "VRML" that even has versions 'VRML 1.0",
"VRML 2.0", but apparently nobody cares. At least not developers. In this
particular case, apparently, it sounds like Blender developers have not
implemented one of the most fundamental of VRML syntaxes, DEF and USE. If
you don't implement those, VRML files become absolutely enormous and are
just ridiculously massive. Why would you not implement those? They are
trivial to implement. It just means "save a copy and use it again". What's
so difficult about that? So far I have not found a single VRML-reader that
properly implements the standard. Either they don't read the
Cone/Cylinder/Sphere objects, or they don't read NULL, or they don't read
DEF/USE. How can that be??
</rant>
I'm not going to take Jmol back to using the high-level objects. Perhaps
someone can look into Blender and see why it is ignoring DEF and USE. Get
on the list, send one of the files from Jmol, and see what they make of it.
My guess is that they do implement DEF/USE in a minimal context -- perhaps
for a Shape only but not Geometry or Appearance. Perhaps Blender developers
can be convinced to fix their code. (Or show me what I am doing wrong such
that all the other programs work but theirs doesn't.) What we need to be
able to do is the following:
Transform{translation -1.229 2.129 .0 rotation -.5 1.866 0 3.142 scale .024
4.916 .024 children[Shape{geometry DEF _6 IndexedFaceSet ......
Transform{translation 2.458 4.257 2.703 rotation 0 1 1 3.142 scale .024
5.405 .024 children[Shape{geometry USE _6 appearance USE _2 }]}
Maybe we will get lucky, and they just require some very nuanced form of
this.
Bob
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