Yuckfu! Dev Diary #3 - Loading and Displaying 3D Models
After some hours of reading to figure out how exactly the memory management with alloc, dealloc, retain and release works with NSObjects in Objective-C (here's a good article) and some more hours to get used to the funny syntax, I was finally able to do something with it.
To get my 3D model onto the iPhone, I had to find a data format that is easy to load and can be used directly in my Application without much modifications. I decided to export the model from Wings3D as Wavefront .OBJ file, which is a pretty straight forward ASCII format. I, however, didn't want to go through the hassle of parsing ASCII data in C, so I wrote a small PHP script to transform this .obj file into a binary format that was ready to be used with OpenGL ES.
This is where the fun starts.