Posted by gouessej on Aug 20, 2016; 11:11am
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/JOGL-2-support-for-Ardor3D-JMonkeyEngine-3-jzy3d-and-NiftyGUI-tp1706747p4037074.html

Hi

I've just committed the very first blueprint of the PLY importer for JogAmp's Ardor3D Continuation:
https://github.com/gouessej/Ardor3D/commit/08892c04fc77090e2b14cc69424b43c708fa6f42

There are some temporary limitations:
- the material indices are loaded but not used when creating the mesh(es)
- it only supports triangles
- the edges are loaded but not used when creating the mesh(es)
- the binary files aren't handled (only ascii for now)

Actually, it has a lot of advantages compared to numerous other free or open source PLY importers:
- it supports texture coordinates like MeshLab
- it's able to load materials
- the treatment of build-in properties and elements can be overridden
- the treatment of custom properties and elements can be implemented by overriding a method
- the importer doesn't stop working when it finds a custom element or property
- it has an excellent management of rotten eggs (malformed files), i.e it shows log messages reporting the exact line number in the parsed file
- it checks the consistency between the elements and the properties
- it gives enough information about custom properties to allow you to implement your own checks
- it's a lot easier to use than jPly as it does a lot more than just parsing and returning parsed elements, it's strongly typed, it gives some possibility of extending exactly where it is useful, there is no need of writing tons of boilerplate code to use it