Philippe Hurbain Wrote:No taboo, but compatibility must be kept with existing parts and tools! And some new tools/viewers able to use these new possibilities must be available. If you have suggestions...
Yes i think it's not hard at all: you define a new comment extension, that define the (per vertex) normal of the following tri/quad:
0 NORMALS v1x v1y v1z v2x v2y v2z v3x v3y v3z [v4x v4y v4z]
It should always come right before each triangle or quad line.
That's it. Old tools will ignore it and keep calculating their normals, new tools can take advantage and avoid reimplementing complex and buggy smoothing algorithms for the thousandth time.
To sanitize the library i suggest the following:
- Take the best looking smoothing algorithm available today (LDView, i guess)
- extract and refactor the smoothing algorithm code to a tool that spit out normals
- feed the library to the tool to automatically add NORMALS to all tri and quad
Maybe it's a little more complex to take into account subparts etc, but it's still a very easy program.