New properties could improve compatibility

1) Unfortunately, this wouldn’t work well with 3DC’ current design. But this could change with version 6.0. I will keep this in mind for the next major release.

2) You should be able to do this already. Plug-ins have userdata that you can update and 3DC will store/retreive the information to the 3DC file regardless of whether the plug-in makes any changes to the scene or not. (see the train simulator wizard) But… I’m not sure if the andquot;saveandquot; flag is set or not if you don’t make any changes. So, if it isn’t you may have to rename a group to the same name or some other similar thing to force 3DC to require the user to save the information.

Richard Borsheim
Amabilis Software

This is a feature request of sorts. andnbsp;I have been working on some plugins to improve Wavefront OBJ import and export capabilities, andnbsp;making 3DC more compatible with Curious Lab’s Poser. andnbsp;There are two items on my wish list that would make things a little easier.

1) The 3DCMaterial object should support a Name property. andnbsp;This would improve compatibility with 3D model formats that use named materials.

2) The 3DCScene, 3DCGroup and 3DCObject objects should provide a Properties collection to allow persistance for plugin specific data. andnbsp;From looking at the parameters passed to the 3DC.Plugin.Main method, it appears that 3DC does provide some support for this, however I assume that these are only applicable when the user modifies the plugin operation. andnbsp;This feature would be useful to store mappings between the 3DC object model and the object model used by a specific external program. andnbsp;

Please consider these improvements in your upcoming versions.

Best Regards,

Kurt Stephens