make loaders to create indexed geometry

You guys aim to deprecate Geometry, and to that end remove it from stuff like OBJLoader. Unfortunately, BufferGeometry you create is flat. If I want to have smooth normals with OBJ model, I am forced to bloat my file and export them. Before I could do

mesh.geometry.computeVertexNormals ();

which was good CPU-vs-file size trade-off. Now, I would have to do

var geometry = new THREE.Geometry ();
geometry.fromBufferGeometry (mesh.geometry);
geometry.mergeVertices ();
geometry.computeVertexNormals ();
mesh.geometry = geometry;

which wastes way more CPU just because you guys destroy index information in the parser, and moreover it will break once you succeed in deprecating Geometry. BufferGeometry can keep this information, so why do you have to choose for me that I do not want it?

[kaisalmen]

@mrdoob and @makc I promised an answer and did not provide it, yet. Here it is.

The answer is simple: WebGL 2.0 only allows a single index.

Regarding OpenGL I found this: AMD_interleaved_elements is an extension for OpenGL 4.3 Core Profile. If I understand the specs correctly understand the maximum index length is rather short and therefore not suited for large meshes:

This extension allows OpenGL to process multi-component packed element data. The maximum size of a vertex’s index data is not increased, but the facility to store 2 16-bit or 2 or 4 8-bit indices per vertex is introduced.

Another idea is to write a custom shader that access the different indices from a buffer texture in the vertex shader, but this will decrease rendering performance (see this stackoverflow post).

[mrdoob]

I will check whether independent buffers for vertex, normals and uvs are possible with WebGL 2. That’s what you meant, right?

Yep!