Lightwave & Blaze 3D

[kopperdrake]

Has anyone used these together? I've a client who's thinking of placing their products on to their website and has been blown away by the quality of the Sony DCR PC1000 demo on the holomatix website. I was just wondering if there's much work between having a textured Lightwave model and getting it out of Blaze 3D looking decent?

[BazC]

Thanks for pointing me at this app! It's pretty expensive but the quality of the examples on the website is superb!

[kopperdrake]

Aye - I know :) The surfacing control is really basic, and seems to rely on texture maps for a lot of the detail - making it much more akin to a games engine approach which makes total sense. I'm struggling a bit getting something out of the demo as a swf file at the moment, I need to pick someone's brains concerning centering the object in 3D space (it doesn't seem to be taking it from Layout or Modeler's zero axis, and how to control the animation externally. I've managed to throw in a mobile phone model I've done in the past, though it's too high res for something like this, but it centres on the top where it hinges so it may be semi-intelligent and know that fully opened this is where the central rotational axis needs to be, but keeps it there even when the phone is closed. I can also see the animation in the editor, but on export there are no controls, so I'm guessing I'd need to add action script to make this work - which is where I'm suddenly out of my depth :) Time to find some forums as I'd love to offer this service!

[Auger]

I just finished up doing a series of cellphones in LW for Alltel that were put up on a website with Blaze 3D. It works pretty well. We had some issues with it... if you turn on back face culling (double-sided in LW speak) you can get weird AA problems... It doesn't support reflection maps - just color and bump which makes it a little difficult to get a shiny phone looking right.

I think a few of these phones are ones that I modeled:
http://www.alltelcoolphones.com/

I don't know that much about the Blaze3D end of things, but if you have any specific questions I might be able to answer them.

Jon

[kopperdrake]

Thanks for the offer Jon :) After a day of playing I think I'm getting the hang of it, though I do know I don't have any decent low-poly models to use in the demo so my files are coming out pretty huge :) Am I right in assuming you've added split lines in as part of the texture and bump maps? I've manged to get animations in and out of Blaze3d - it seems that the initial frame it opens on is based on the angle of the object to the camera in the preview window, which feels weird as you can freely rotate the camera in that viewport whilst you're adding textures and so on.

My main issues now are to do with action script, pretty much all at the Flash end :) I've used Flash, but I'm not exactly a heavy action-script kind of person, so I might approach a fellow web-developer to see if they want to offer this service between us.

Cheers :D

[Auger]

Thanks for the offer Jon :) After a day of playing I think I'm getting the hang of it, though I do know I don't have any decent low-poly models to use in the demo so my files are coming out pretty huge :) Am I right in assuming you've added split lines in as part of the texture and bump maps? I've manged to get animations in and out of Blaze3d - it seems that the initial frame it opens on is based on the angle of the object to the camera in the preview window, which feels weird as you can freely rotate the camera in that viewport whilst you're adding textures and so on.

My main issues now are to do with action script, pretty much all at the Flash end :) I've used Flash, but I'm not exactly a heavy action-script kind of person, so I might approach a fellow web-developer to see if they want to offer this service between us.

Cheers :D


kopperdrake,

I'm not sure what you mean by split lines for the texture maps. They were straight ahead UV maps.

I don't know much about the Flash end of things, but I would give the Blaze artist a LW scene file that had the phone facing the camera and then opening in ten frames. I would scale the phone as it opened so that it would stay in frame. This is what he required in order to do his thing.

Wish I could be more help.

Jon

[kopperdrake]

Ah ha - UV maps :) I was on about the splits in the molding of the phone casings - but you using UV maps answers my question - basically add the detail as a texture map as opposed to modelling it in :)

Cheers for that! I wondered if Blaze used UV mapping - that means I could model a relatively simple object geometry-wise and even use photographs of the phones as a basis for the textures.

Thanks again :)

[Auger]

Yeah, some of the splits I would model in but many were UV maps.

You definately want to go pretty low-res. I tried to stay around 5000 polys, but a couple of the phones were about 10-12,000 and worked fine.

I used photos for most of the mapping, such as the keypad, screens, etc. But drew in the splits (I like that term:thumbsup: ) and the holes and such.

Glad to help,

Jon

[kopperdrake]

Glad you helped :D