#New PD 3D CD
9 messages in this thread
Hi All,
A friend of mine recently picked up a Toaster 4000. He downloaded some
Imagine objects from one of the local BBS's and asked me to drop by and
convert some of them with Interchange+. When they were converted and test
rendered he was a little disappointed with the results. I then showed him
how to align and merge polygons, rename surfaces and apply textures.
Within an hour we had his objects looking pretty good but he was a bit
surprised about how much work is left to be done when Interchange gets
finished.
Now the fun part; He suggested that we should release a CD-ROM of PD
objects that have been tweaked for use with LightWave. All of the objects
would have descriptive surface names (no more "disk 37-light red") and
would have polygons merged and aligned for quickest rendering. They would
also contain all of the approprate (SP?) textures mapped properly.
Complex objects would also come with a render of the object as well as the
scene file used to generate the render.
I addition to objects we'd also like the disc to contain LightWave related
PD/Shareware programs. Things like Rend24, the Star creator, the Particle
Fountain, ect.
Brushmap collections, material collections, and interesting image
sequences (eg. fire or rain) will also be on the disc if we can get any.
As you can imagine, converting and texturing the objects will be a HUGE
amount of work and it will be a little harder to get a free disc from us
than it is from Syndesys with their 3D ROM. What we had in mind is
something like this: If you submit a complex LightWave object with all of
the texturing done and sensable surface names we send you a free disc.
If you send us a LW object that need minor tweaking (less than 15 minutes)
you get 50% off on the purchase of the disc.
If you send us an Imagine object with a set of images to use as textures
AND detailed instructions on where to map the images, AND the original
object follows certain naming/grouping guidlines you'd get 25% off on the
purchase of the disc.
If you send us a simple Imagine object with no textures we'd probably just
laugh at it and format the floppy it came on. ;^)
In short, we want to release a disc of the highest quality LightWave
objects we can, and the less work we have to do on your object the bigger
discount you get. Discount percentages may change somewhat once we get a
bit further into the planning, but we're shooting for $100 US for the
final price of the disc.
Any comments or suggestions?
Jeff H…
I've got a few LWOB's I can send you…..:^)
Keep On Toastin'
Erik Flom
Hi Eric,
Thanks for the offer of the LW objects. I'll put your name on the list,
but for the time being you should hang onto them till we get a few of the
details worked out. (Like where to store them while we're collecting
them.) At this point we're still in the earliest planning stages so if
you've got any suggestions, now's the time to make them. :^)
Jeff H…
Suggestions…..I'd like to see all the various PD scans of Wood, Marble,
Metal, etc. organized into subdirectories, with full 32 char names (still
Mac compatible, so you've got another chunk of the market. :^)
Your CD-ROM sounds like a good idea. I'll be waiting with objects when
you're ready.
Good Luck, &
Keep On Toastin'
Erik Flom
Eric,
We had given some thought to including some images of marble, wood, and
rock. I personally don't think we should waste much space on them since
their biggest limitation is that they usually don't tile well without
being really obvious that they ARE tiles. I'd much rather spend the time
we could have been collecting those scanned images working on some nice
settings for the procedural textures built into LightWave. They take up
far less memory and you can put them on any size or shape object. There
will be a lot of small image maps that are designed to tile. I've got
brushes for stuff like dots, grids, checkerplate, hexigons, ect that show
up as taking anywhere from 0k to 1k when loaded into LW. By comparison a
752*480*24 bit image of wood will take up about 1.1 megs when loaded.
I guess the bottem line is that there will be some full size 24 bit images
to use as textures, but unless we get a lot of people asking for them
there won't be that many.
As an added example of what you can do with small images here's a tip for
all you LightWave users who want to make cones of light.
If you dont' have AdPro, this should also work with other paint programs
or image processors.
1. Start AdPro and use the backdrop loader.
2. Set the colors in the top 2 boxes to black and the bottom 2 to white.
3. Set image width to 2 and height to 400.
4. Press accept to generate the backdrop. You will get a thin vertical
strip going from black to white.
5. Run the color to gray operator then save the image as an 8 bit IFF.
6. Run your Toaster, go into the modeler, make a cone, and export it back
to layout.
7. In the surfaces window set the color to white.
8. Apply the gradient image as a transparency map. Use cylindrical mapping
along the 'Y' axis and auto size it.
9. Add a spotlight, parent it to the cone and adjust the position. You'll
also want to adjust the cone angle of the spotlight to match the cone
you've built and move the pivot point of the cone to the tip.
10. Do a couple of test renders and adjust the base transparency till you
get a nice light cone.
If your scene is supposed to take place in a place with heavy mist you may
want to add some fractal noise and give it some velocity. Start with about
1/10 the cone size.
The gradient image you used for this should take up just under 1k but will
work as well as a 752*480 image.
Pretty easy eh?
Jeff H…
You might want to consider JPEG'ing all the image maps. That way you could
get some real big ones in there. (I tend to avoid tiling textures whenever
possible, though I've DL'd some decent tiles…)
The idea of having groups of procedural textures is really nice. That's
one thing about Stratavision on the Mac – it comes with _tons_ of
predefined surface textures, and they're all viewable as little
pre-rendered shperes along the bottom of the screen.
(You should _Really_ consider supplying something like the texture example
scene. Break procedural textures into groups, and include them in a number
of sample scene files. If at all possible, have color print samples made
showing small swatches of each surface, B&W prints just don't cut it.)
Your suggestion for using small bitmaps is a good one. If you need any
small maps like that, I've got several.
BTW, I've also found that alot of my reflection maps can be shrunk down to
320x200x256 colors. I just run a low-pass/blur filter on the image before
& after scaling the image. This works mainly gradient reflection maps,
like gleams, flashes, etc. One of my favorites takes only 93K when loaded,
but looks as good as a 1MB image…..
Keep On Toastin'
Erik Flom
Jeff,
Our company designs LW architectural objects and our first CD-ROM collection is
coming out soon. We have some objects that we want to place into Public Domain
as means of advertising. Tell me more about your project and we may send you
some very high resolution objects.
Jacek Artymiak (Bitmap Studios Ltd)
Jacek,
Our CD-ROM is still in the earliest planning stages, but here's what we
have in mind for it:
Our disc is going to contain the highest quality PD/Shareware objects,
brushmaps, materials, and other related programs that we can get our hands
on. Since the disc will be aimed at LightWave users only, our main
priority is to have nice looking LightWave objects. Owners of other 3D
pacages will have to do their own conversion. All objects on the disc will
be fully textured and have descriptive surface names. Each object or scene
will have one or more renders as well as the scene file used to create the
render. The idea is that the end user should be able to load a scene and
KNOW that their going to get a nice render on the first try without fine
tuning the object or the lighting.
Of course detailed readme files for the objects are encouraged and if
you'd like to include some renders of other products you make, we hope to
have an advertising area/photo gallery. We're still not sure what sort of
limitations will have to be placed on renders.
At this point we're not collecting the objects yet, but if you want to
contribute something I'll put your name on a list and notify you when we
are ready to start receiving stuff for the disk.
As we get a bit further into the planning stages I'll be posting a text
file with some guidelines on what sort of stuff we'd like to include on
the disk and how to go about getting your latest masterpiece included.
;^)
Jeff H…
Jeff,
We have some nice furniture and interiors objects that we'll gladly pass on to
others as PD. They are very detailed and all textures have meaningful names.
Detailed descriptions and renderings are also available. I think it'll be best
if you upload a text file describing your project to CompuServe, ftp sites,
etc. Please don't forget to include a standard release form as well. I'm
looking forward to receiving more information about your project.
Kind Regards,
Jacek Artymiak (Bitmap Studios Ltd)
Bitmap Studios Ltd
Standbrook House
2-5 Old Bond Street
London
W1X 3TB
England
tel: +44 71 493 4244
fax: +44 71 491 0605