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Hi gang :)
I'm a newbie on the 3d area so I hope you can help me.
When I export a circle/globe from 3ds using Illustrate, circles are formed by lots of straight lines.
It seems to me that some of the advantages of vector based graphics are lost.
Is it really true that you can't export a true vector based circle from 3ds?
Hope to hear you thoughts on this matter
//podenphant
Well first let me say that illustrate is a bit sloppy at exporting the vector edges. Thats what your seeing I think. Thats one way that David is able to make the renders happen so fast, he lets the quality of the render not be as high as it could be. If I remember right you can set the quailty of the edges in Illustrate so you might want to look at that.
It might also have to do with the tensilation of the model you are using. If you are using a low poly model this could also result in the low quality circle edges. You might want to up the segments in your sphere to somthing like 48 on all three axis. This should help some of the problem.
And finaly The cleanest output that I have seen is from Swifts Ravix II engine. Cost is about the same but the vector output is the best.
Just my thoughts on this, Regards, Bill
[QUOTEIs it really true that you can't export a true vector based circle from 3ds?[/QUOTE]
Not sure what you mean by a 'true' vector-based circle. The .SWF file format supports shapes, whose definition can be perused in detail at http://www.openswf.org . There is no 'CIRCLE' tag.
If I recall correctly (it's been a while), the highest-degree curve supported by the .SWF format is quadratic. In Flash, you can see curves represented by tangent handles on either side of a point.
Even in the Flash development environment, a circle is not a 'true' circle. It is represented as a sequence of curves. For example, http://www.2112fx.com/image/flashcircle.gif . Create a circle yourself, then go into subselect mode (I always want to call this sub-object mode).
A vector renderer exports a perspective view of an object in a shape tag, which is a delta-encoded sequence of points and curve information, along with fill information for the shape. Most of them employ a simple approach of representing the outline of a shape as a sequence of lines (one coefficient of the quadratic is zero).
Swift 3D has the ability to render curves and control the degree of fit between straight lines and curves. So, it can get much closer to a 'smooth' representation of something like a circle.
As Bill said, much depends on the detail of your geometry. Even in Swift, it takes a pretty high-poly sphere to generate a 'smooth' outline.
I apologize if I butchered some of the explanation -- it's been quite some time since I experimented with writing directly to .SWF from C++. There is a forum devoted to this topic on FlashKit with people much more up to date than myself.
good luck!
well for 3d vector exports i recomend you use either vecta 3d or swift 2