I tried mapping a jpg as a texture onto a shape which had been saved as a child .model and re-imported.
1. The resulting 3D image is awesome for very little extra work
2. Looks like shapes exported and re-imported causes an error in the .swf
3. Textured image becomes gray in the swf
However this error seems only to occur when re-importing a shape, not if you import a .3ds
Here's one for SirN and his racecar buddies.
As with the previous two, these models are in Wings and exported as .3ds for use in 3DFA.
BTW the models took ridculously short times to develop, around 45 minutes each. The racecar being the most because I had to attach four wheels and axles and aerofoil surfaces. Note too that in the animation the axles break through the bodywork because they were added late to the design so they may be "higher" in the design hierarchy (dunno for sure)
The wheels are colors and the bodywork is a texture with numbers tohelp identify the areas on the body
I've been using Blender for a long time- since it was version 1.2 or earlier. I know that you can export 3ds files from it, but you need to use an export script. You can download these python scripts if you go to this site.
This is a single wireframe - unlike previous models which had wheels added as extra objects in Wings. There is a screenshot of the finished movie in the zip file.
The texture map rc1.jpg overlays at a skew angle because of a setup error when I created the wireframe but you can rotate the imported .3ds by yourself and make a new overlay.
I have included a bare .3ds of just the axles and wheels so you can add your own racecar body over it using 3D shapes. Just make an elaborate coffin shape and place it over the axles.
The Wings modeller has a UV mapper but it does not seem to be very elegant, so try this.
1. Create a Wings 3D object.
2. Export from Wings as a .obj and also as .3ds
3. Import the .obj into UVMapper
4. Create a planar map and save as .bmp and then convert to .gif using paint or any paint tool.
5. Edit the map and save only the left half
6. Color as required e.g. in Paint
7. Import the .3ds into 3DFA as a model
8. Import the texture from step 5 as planar, Z axis
Done !
The attached zip file has the components for a cube, extruded on one face then reduced, extruded some more and then bevelled (36 vertices, 30 faces)
knubby.obj
knubby.3ds
knubby.gif (from UVmapper) which is converted from .bmp to save space here
knubby1.gif (the left half, colored)
knubby2.gif (colored more for some more faces)
The finished result is 100x better than trying to guesstimate where to color by hand. Hope this info is of some use to the community.
Following on from the post above, here is another sample.
In this one the pair of axles, a single extrusion object, made in Wings, has a UV map created by UVMapper but such great detail is not required. However it does show where each mapped axle is so it was easy to color the map. It also looks like it shows the wheels as smaller reflected objects like mushrooms, but in fact thats not the wheels, which are actually bands along the top and bottom. I dont know what the mushrooms are but they dont show up in the 3D object anyway!
The finished movie is more like a cartoon style set of wheels and the mapping image axles2a.gif only needs broad areas of color to produce the finished movie as shown in the snapshot movie.jpg
axles2.gif Original map
axles2a.gif Simplified map
axles.movie 3dfa movie
movie.jpg snapshot