#VistaPro
Mike (and anyone else who's interested),
A typical "good" Vistapro image consists of 1 to 10 _MILLION_ 3D polygons. I
have rendered images with as many as 150M polygons. The density of the
polygons varies with the camera position. For instance, a tree near the camera
will be be generated with many more polygons than a tree that is far away. So,
in a sense, each scene of a VP3 animation is a seperate 3D world unto itself —
although they're all related of course.
Vistapro is designed to render realistic (or not) looking landscapes, it's not
a general purpose 3D renderer. It has many optimizations and limitations based
upon this goal. 3DS does what it does very well, but it's not designed to do
what Vistapro does.
That said, I'm am currently adding DXF as an output format to Vistapro. I
expect this feature will be used as David Taffet indicates: Use the DXF
landscape as a guide for placing other objects and generating camera paths,
then either throw away the landscape or use it as a matte. Then use a Vistapro
image(s) as a background(s) and use 3DS to render the foreground(s). The one
thing you won't have is accurate shadows cast upon the Vistapro background. I
spoke with Gary Yost a few days ago and he indicated that "shadows on mattes"
was on their wish-list for 3DSr3 but it didn't make it. Oh well, maybe in rev
4!
When saving a landscape as a DXF file you have control over the amount of
detail and the area covered (always rectangular though) by the DXF file. If
the indicated area will turn out to be more than 64K points or faces (the limit
for a single object in 3DS and AutoCAD) Vistapro will automatically save it as
several smaller objects. As the code is currently implemented, you will not
have "smooth" joints between the seperate objects (for those of you who will
want to actually render the landscape) but I _DO_ have a painless solution for
that. Well, painless to you guys anyway! If you want to, you can save several
small areas out in high detail and they will be loaded into their proper
locations (relative to each other) by 3DS.
The DXF objects I create do not contain the 3D trees or 3D fractal detail that
Vistapro generates. Even so, the DXF files are very large: A small Vistapro
landscape at "full" detail (polygon size 1 for those of you who use Vistapro)
makes a 15MB DXF file with 66000 points and 130000 faces. A huge landscape is
1M points, 2M faces, and a 250MB DXF file. If I saved out all the trees and
fractal detail in that 150M polygon rendering that I mentioned above would make
a DXF file of around 60GB! One small consolation though: once you have loaded
the DXF file into 3DS you can save it out as a 3DS object and it will take up
only 1/5 as much space.
Some other things in the works include the ability to save the colors (that
Vistapro would have put on the landscape) as a TGA, PCX or GIF file that you
can use as a texture map in 3DS. These too can grow very large if you want
lots of detail. I also plan to create utilities to translate Vistapro Camera
scripts into 3DS format and vice versa. I may add the ability to load the DXF
objects that I save — but generally not other DXF files.
The executables I sent to a few people for testing was named VP4.EXE but I did
that just be sure they didn't accidentally overwrite their existing VP3.EXE.
VP4 won't ship until sometime next year, but I'm considering a 3.1 upgrade for
those of you who need some of the new features sooner. Enhancements that are
already in it are: optimization for the Pentium, smoother animations at slow
camera speeds and DXF output. Later on I plan to add anti-aliasing, maybe
field rendering, and the ability to have Vistapro spawn a batch file after
rendering and saving each frame of an animation — this will give you the
ability to process the last rendered image, send it to a single frame recorder,
whatever you can do from a batch file.
I'm open to suggestions and input from anyone… Please keep in mind that
Vistapro is MUCH less expensive that 3DS — so don't expect me to do everything
that it does!
John.