Is shockwave still supported in 9/9.3/9.5/9.6

For alpha channels use .png they are much smaller. Alpha channel works a bit different in llightwave than in shockwave, alpha channel in lightwave will make the base texture show through (or another texture) but will not give you transparency unless you map a transparency map in the the appropiate channel. In shockwave the alpha on the color texture will show up as transparent. You can also use tga, but I use PNG for the lossless compression, if the image has no alpha I use jpg. Most of my scenes have both.

Looking at your image again, you can also avoid the blury ground by using a pair of tiled textures on two surfaces, one for the grass, another for the trail. It will look nicer and load faster.

As far as literature.. well I haven't found much.. there are good (if a bit dated) director tutorials in:

http://www.deansdirectortutorials.com/

I don't use director myself I just hand the w3d file to a programmer and he does the rest, but through trial and error we have come to find a few things that work. The file size of the finished movie is mostly images and code so don't worry too much about geometry, we have a few scenes with over 10,000 polygons that run fine on an average computer.
 
@Danner,

Thanks again, I am in the same type of environment, 3D artist working with a programmer. I do my magic and he does his. I've been to deansdirectortutorials some good information there.

Thanks again for the help, if you ever need a hand with something feel free to email me.

Tony :)
 
Agree with pretty much that all has been said.

In regards to your uv's it happens in shockwave when u r so far from objects and its uv's. Normally if you have a bigger texture it won't be so bad (ie if it was 512 x 512 at least)

Lining up the skybox uv's might fix it with a better sized texture, but sometimes you just have to make the uv's slightly smaller than what they are meant to be.

Also yeah, up the poly count and texture count, most pc's are handling fine these days.
 
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@mdoyle,

Thanks for the assist, it's greatly appreciated!

I'll post another pic later to show you guys how I fixed some of the items mentioned.

Tony :)
 
Thanks guys for the assit with this project, now I've got a pipeline working for walk thru's .tif files work great with alpha's.

TOny :)
 
Just a quick note and smaller in file size.

PSD's with an alpha channel also work well for transparency.

Use these in the colour channel when exporting the w3d, u get better transparency without a fringe.

After that I would suggest using jpegs for textures without alphas as they are smaller in file size.

M
 
@mdoyle,

Thanks for the info, here's a quick screen grab for my project nearly completed Tif working great will try .psd next time out, though the only other problem I am having is this particular jumper has four seperate color panels assigned to the geometery as you can see from the wireframe, but in the Shockwave environment I lose those colors not sure why this is happening. If it's LW related or DI related? and I'm still getting the whitish haze, nearly there though! Cans look much better though!

Tony :)
 

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Is the 4 seperate colours applied as a colour texture map or are the seperate surfaces applied in lightwave?
 
they are four seperate surfaces that have a color assigned to those polygons no texture map applied. hmmm.... that makes me think I'll have to double check to make sure the texture button is not depressed.

Thanks :)
 
I think I know what your "haze" could be.. the ambient light, it's way too high so instead things with no light showing up as black they look gray! (that is why the color is dissapearing from the walls. it's replaced by the ambient color, because it can't go all the way to black.


Add a couple more lights, It will bring the detail out from the doorway. Lights look very different in w3d so you might have to experiment a bit to get the right look. Don't forget to save before exporting and close Layout after a couple of exports.. the memory leak bug rears its ugly head.
 
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