initial thoughts on Swift demo.

[gooch]

First of all I should say that I have experience with both Vecta and Illustrate! plug-in for Max.

Everything that is said good about swift renderer is true. the gradients and shadows are terrific and add much depth to pieces. What I really like about it is that it is not necessary to render outlines with swift. With vecta and Illustrate if you have one object in the foreground and another object with the same material further back on the Z rendered without outlines the two shapes become one. without posting examples its hard to appreciate how much better it looks.

Unfortunately, though I have already run into problems with the animation importing. I had a character set up with forward kinematics and animation. I have rendered it with the vecta plugin on R2.5 and all the animation looked fine. With swift when I imported the .3ds it looks like all my axis gor screwed up or reset. The first frame all objects are in corect position but rotated. when the animation is played all the keyframes are there but since the axis are messed nothing goes right. Like I said its simple animtion, all rotations. I assume that something in the way I created or set up the character is not jiving with Swift or the .3ds format. any ideas?


one more time though, the shading and lighting is better than anything around I've used by leaps and bounds.

jk

[theMatrix]

Character animation is a mixed bag. The default view in Swift 3D may be different than the viewport you were using in MAX. Try changing the view in Swift3D. Do you use a camera in the MAX scene?

If it still is not working, you are welcome to send me the .3DS file off list and I'll look at it (if you can catch me before I leave for FF2k).

Good luck!

P.S. I spent a great deal of time with the Vecta plug-in for MAX 3 (doing lots of character animation). I also spent two months evaluating Illustrate! for MAX 2.5 and 3.0 - have you tried the Illustrate 5.0 beta? Pretty much a catch-up to Vecta. We should compare notes some time.

[gooch]

I have never read much about Illustrate on Flashkit. I like the control of brushes, outlines, intersections, and such. I did have problems with it though where objects would be arrange differently in neighboring frames(meaning 1 frame and object would be in front of another and then behind in the next) What I don't like about vecta and illustrate is that the outlines have to be rendered separatley from the poly/fills. I've done tests where I'll render a frame with outlines and then I'll render same frame without and add outlines in flash and the file size on the second is much smaller. Thats what really cool about Swift is that with the lighting and gradients outlines aren't necessary.