ase and 3ds

Hello everybody

I’m just playing around with the ase and 3ds file formats.
I have the following question:
Is it right that a 3ds file stores more “redundant” information
than an ase file concerning vertex/mappingcoords data?
I mean a simple cube saved in ase uses 8 vertices and 12
“texture-vertices”. Saving the same cube in a 3ds file
needs 26 vertices.
Is that right or am I completely wrong?
Greets
pgup

You’re right, a cube saved in 3ds format got more than 12 vertices since in 3ds file a vertex got one and only one texture coordinate (u and v). Whereas ASE file split texture coordinates and vertex, (I don’t know if u understand me), in ASE file format, there is a texture coordinate array and a texture coordinate index array, each vertex got an index for the texture coordinate array. This is not a little bit usefull, and you’ve got to recalculate your arrays to use vertex arrays (which are pretty faster than immediate mode), if you use 3ds file, you can easily use vertex arrays. This is why there are 26 vertices for a cube in 3ds file, coz there are 26 different texture coordinates, whereas there are only 12 different vertices in a cube (of course).

Hope it can help!!
Arath