OpenCTM has now been downloaded more than 1000 times — which I find quite amazing given its relatively short life time.

Thanks everyone for showing so much interest!

This second production release of OpenCTM is a minor update to the v1.0 release. It is fully backwards compatible, but adds a few improvements:

• Drastically reduced memory footprint. The LZMA compression has been tuned so that the default setting is now to use a 64 KB dictionary (was 16 MB in v1.0), without any loss in compression ratio for most models.
• Added support for the Wavefront OBJ file format (converter & viewer).
• Some improvements to the converter and viewer tools (e.g. better Explorer integration under Windows).
• General source directory and build system cleanup.

The first production release of OpenCTM has been released!

Packages for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and most other operating systems are now available for download.

The 1.0 release of OpenCTM is getting closer. Among the news are:

• The converter tool now support COLLADA files.
• Python bindings and a demo Python application.
• Improved internal integrity checking in the OpenCTM API.
• Complete file format specification.

The final work is currently being done on the format specification, after which the release will be made.

OpenCTM 0.8 beta has been released!

This new release contains only a few minor (but important) changes:

• Introduced a new API function for controlling the compression level (ctmCompressionLevel), and set the default compression level to 5 (rather than 9, which would eat a lot of memory, usally without much difference).
• Changed the name "texture map" in the API to "UV map" (and all corresponding constant and function names).
• A few updates to the documentation.

If you feel that OpenCTM is an interesting technology, and want to help promoting it, please have a look at the items below and if you are interested, contact me at :

• Beta testing.
• Improvement of the Blender import/export scripts.
• Import/export plugins for 3D authoring tools and converters (3D Studio, Maya, ...).
• COLLADA converter.
• Language bindings (C#, Python, ...).

There is now an issue tracker for OpenCTM that is open for new reports. Please use it for any issues that you may encounter when using OpenCTM - after all, the beta phase is there for eliminating bugs and other issues.

The tracker can be found here.

OpenCTM 0.7 beta has been released!

There are now source and binary distributions available in the Download section.

Although the release is labeled Beta, it is a stable release. After the beta testing phase, it will be promoted to version 1.0.

I am currently in the process of finalizing the documentation for the OpenCTM software library, and the API and the file format is fairly stable by now, meaning that OpenCTM is almost ready for beta testing.

In other news, a C++ wrapper layer for the API has been created to better take advantage of C++ exception handling etc. Also, Delphi language bindings have been created so that OpenCTM can be used from Delphi applications.

Two tools are now included in the OpenCTM package:

• A file format converter (to/from OpenCTM, STL and Stanford PLY).
• An OpenGL-based 3D viewer (works on Windows, Mac and Linux).

I have also started working on Blender plugins for exporting and importing OpenCTM files directly without the need of a conversion tool.