Sophie 3D Player

[dVyper]

It seems the 3D Flash market hasn't stopped expanding!

There is yet another library which claims that it "can render in realtime over 50.000 polygons with texture maps, reflection maps, transparent materials, an infinite number of lights and shadow planes". And it probably can. Obviously just don't expect it to be able to do it more than once per second.

Here be the link:
http://www.sophie3d.com/

Weirdly I get lots of runtime exceptions on that page, but the example still runs.

[TOdorus]

Weirdly I get lots of runtime exceptions on that page, but the example still runs.

Maybe that's why the bottom of the chairs and tables aren't transparent?

[hatu]

They should choose something that runs smoothly for the demo, that didn't really make me want to try it. Errors and fps is maybe 1

[renderhjs]

render wise a very nice approach- it even seems to be decent fast if you dont use a bloated 3d model.

239,00 euro just for a player and Obj>binary converter is a number of its own,- will see if they can survive on their own as the free available scripts/ engines are getting easier and easier to use.
I think their main target group are ID-designers and otehr novice artists who dont know to much about html, flash, as3 and alike and rather want a easy solution.

I see some qualities mainly beein its performance for those big objcets. The website looks however (my impression) like a fraud attempt. There is no real contact information, nor how the engine really differs from the rest (perhaps, not saying that but perhaps they even used another engine!?!). As for payment it only offers a blunt contact formular that reminds of phishing sites. Payment options

We use Paypal as a payment method.

And alot of information is repeated over the whole site- very odd.

it would be nice to see some fully texturized game characters in it,- although I doubt that the engine is optimized at all for interactive scenes with moving items.
nice find though

[lesli_felix]

This looks more like a quick and dirty way to get existing 3d models up on the web for viewing, and less like a developers API.

IMO there's probably a pretty good market for that.

Scrollwheel kept its focus on the page though, they might wanna look into that.

[tomsamson]

Yeah, i agree, i think there´s a market for something like that,too.
That the scrollwheel scrolls the page even when the flash is focussed is due to them using a wmode setting,that leads to this bug on various browsers.

[Sophie3D]

From Sophie 3D support: Thanks for your interest in our player.

Dvyper – you may be getting exceptions on the page because you're using a developers version of Flash. It was built for Flash 9 and the frame rate should be well above 1fps: even for the largest model currently on the site, the Bugatti model, that you can find on our examples page. This model has 69000 polygons.

Renderhjs – It is important to be careful about to whom you give your money, but no it is not a phishing site! There is the free player you can download and use - you pay for Sophie3DPro which gives you a site licence for a version that plays without the Sophie3D logo. We had a look at your site an we would be very interested in whatever you can do with the player.

lesli_ felix and tomsamson – thanks for the scrollwheel observations

[renderhjs]

I gave your player a spin because I am mainly interested in performance as it seems to be very fast with big files,- but unfortunately it did not succeeded yet
from http://flashenabledblog.com/2008/11/...hie-3d-engine/

fter trying their sample, i want to test with my own model. Since i havn’t Rhino 4. So, i try to use 3d max to export my model into wavefront object and load with the player. But seem can’t make it success with any setting. Hope they will have more info on authoring 3d model. It is important for content maker.

I had the very same,- nothing at all happend with Silo or 3dsmax OBJ wavefront exports.
So I modified the header in the Obj files equal to one of your Rhino samples:

# Rhino

mtllib cartoon.mtl
o occhio_1
usemtl occhio_1 

of course with the correct material file (*.mtl) and finally I got something, though very weired:

(maybe not so well visible in the screenshot,- but the model is flat like a paper)

it seems that all Y- coordinates of the vertex points are set to 0 or perhaps are not propper read,- perhaps you missed some double returns? better check
objFile = objFile.split("\n\r").join("\n");
so you dont get the messup with the different encodings on different OS/ applications ect.

I also noticed that 3dsmax (in version 9, 2009 has a new OBJ im/exporter) 3dsmax writes some additional comments and values in the file compared to your examples from Rhino. It looks here like this, where "..." is meant as skip- anything else is excatly as in my file

# Max2Obj Version 4.0 Mar 10th, 2001
#
mtllib ./teapod.mtl
g
# object (null) to come ...
#
v  0.755938 1.470893 -0.003727
v  0.744427 1.516392 -0.003727
...
v  0.559473 1.525781 -0.271190
v  0.637626 1.470893 -0.304442
# 530 vertices

vt  2.000000 2.000000 0.000000
vt  2.000000 1.975000 0.000000
...
vt  0.000000 0.250000 0.000000
vt  0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
# 792 texture vertices

vn  -0.967490 -0.244761 -0.063678
vn  -0.971564 0.236646 0.007913
...
vn  0.348412 0.928127 -0.131110
vn  0.487211 0.839483 -0.240612
# 530 vertex normals

g (null)
usemtl Material__25
s 1
f 7/7/7 2/2/2 1/1/1
f 1/1/1 6/6/6 7/7/7
...
# 992 faces

g 

as you can see there are some random g and s lines

if its about parsing the OBJ files these links might help for a quicker and cleaner read in method:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/quickstart.html
http://krijnhoetmer.nl/stuff/regex/cheat-sheet/
http://regexlib.com/CheatSheet.aspx
http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-shee...s-cheat-sheet/

[Sophie3D]

Thanks renderhjs,

We were talking about the problem of exporting from Max this morning and how each program has own particular ways of translating into obj. We set the program up for Rhino as it's a very good program but we need to set it up to work better with the exported obj files from the good and versatile Max too. Thanks for taking the time to look into the code and sharing your opinion - we will try and solve the problem so that you can try it out with your models - as it is fast and we're sure you'll be able to do a lot with it.

[Sophie3D]

renderhjs,
Thanks again for the suggestions. We have managed to solve it and in the end it was a fairly simple, we presume, mistake by 3Ds Max. After the vector coordinate references (and not the others)
vn 0.000000 1.000000 -0.000000
vn 0.000000 1.000000 -0.000000
vn 0.000000 1.000000 -0.000000
there were two spaces after the vn rather than one...

There was also an extra ./ in front of ./teiera.mtl

Seems to work fine now - we tried it with a 130000 polygon model too. We are currently recompiling the program and then we'll update the server. When the new version is available today or tomorrow we'll post.

We have also set a new blog at http://sophie3d.blogspot.com where you are all welcome to come and tell us about any problems you are having - or improvements or anything you would like to see...

[mr_malee]

anything you would like to see...

the source code

great job though, looks pretty solid

[Sophie3D]

You will be glad to hear that we have resolved the problem with 3DsMax and now you can download the new version (1.2) from our site.

We have also included the possibility, with the online Publisher and from within html, to setup Flash so that the variable "Antialiasing on Play" is set by default to on.

Have fun with it...

From Sophie3D support

[renderhjs]

I got it running (finally) though some hacking was still required as it seems 3dsmax (R9) does not export usefull material files - and your engine seems to rely on them.

http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashkit/sophie3d/

I tested a older animation model that I created some time ago

subdivision surface modeling 63.072 triangles (mesh, not poly) as raw OBJ file 6,07 MB file + 512² difuse texture (91 KB JPEG image). But even compressed the model is still 1,57 MB as zObj.

I first got it running without propper material definitions, smoothing groups seem to be working

it looks just like in the view port when aliasing is turned on,- performance is decent here considering such a highpoly object is rendered while moving.


finally textures are working,- I copy pasted some lines of the example models,- is self illumination supported?


some material but a dirtmap on the difuse texture, seams are more visible, whats missing are the toon shader and ink effect - just in comparison a screenshot from AE:



some more suggestions from my side, I would like to have a base grid (parameter option available) so that depth, size and proportions are easier to read when presenting models on the web.
A gradient background instead of a flat rectangle- it seems that you draw a rectangle in the background (I noticed this once as 1 pixel row of the default flash background color was visible)- filling that with a gradient shouldn't be that much of trouble. It would certainly add more depth.

Here is mockup how I could imagine it:

a compass would be another neat feature,- and a more compressed context menu - like just 4-5 items would be nice as well. And the logo has some flaws,- anti-aliasing of the sub-text is hardly readable (screenshot of flash?) - the red and blue color is imo. a bad and overused combo something with more harmony would look more professional.

Will have a post at some 3d boards I am active on soon- see what they say. After all I have seen already multiple attempts at excatly this but your attempt seems so far the most powerfull viewer (from a polylimit perspective).

[renderhjs]

checked your binary file against my binary file format that stores shorts instead of floats - but the file size is only a little bit smaler (I assumed a bit more)

the previous character I posted was in your zObj format:
1,57 MB
my binary (PLY) file was:
1,28 MB

so it could be about 18.4 % smaler if you'd store less floating values.

Another idea to shorten the filesize by half would be to store only quads (as most modelers prefer working with them anyway - esspecially with subD. modeling). Then in the engine retriangulate all faces and texture faces.
At least in 3dsmax you can set the OBJ export settings to "export quads" and it tries to keep faces as quads if possible- this only works on Poly objects in 3dsmax- as Meshes (the other ones) only consist of triangles.

Yet another idea would be some kind of RLE compression.

It would be also nice to have the material defenitions in the zObj fileformat- not sure how things are atm. so loading attempts can kept at a minimum- because atm. a loading bar pops up 2 or 3 times in a sequence.

And while we are at it- what about alpha channels - are PNG 32 bit supported ? (24 bit RGB + 8 bit alpha).

[.hooligan]

Hey render how many polygons in that model?

[renderhjs]

he he you skipped my text

63.072 triangles/ polygons/ faces
quite a huge amount

[.hooligan]

Hahah whoops, briefly skipped over the technical details. And eyes kept moving straight to the images.

63.072! Have you tried that same model in the other 3d API's?

Do you know if sophie supports animation?

[renderhjs]

no (not yet at least) seems to be highly optimized for static models- I noticed even some caching mechanics with very complex models while rotating - seems to leave out some faces then.

what seems to be supported however are:
- transparency in material definitions (hopefully in Bitmaps as well)
- phong shading
- smoothing groups
- aliasing switch on interaction
- Loads Wavefront OBject Files (OBJ) and their material Definitions
- can be compressed with a binary custom file format (using FP 10 binary writing abilities [gonna have to check that out as well])

and of course the ability to process big big models- though the examples on the website are imo. a bit overkilling on most computers I tested it on. A dual core or quad core should let things run smoother

Have you tried that same model in the other 3d API's

will do that soon- but I assume it wont perform that nice but I will try it

[renderhjs]

posted a thread at polycount:
http://boards.polycount.net/showthre...795#post865795

already with a first test from someone else:
http://racer445.com/3d_test/sofa_1.html

others were telling that the cinema4d OBJ export did not work (perhaps because of the smoothing groups? - as C4d seems to handle them differently - or so I heard).

[rachil0]

Wow, 63K? That is a seriously large number for a pure flash renderer! You can see some detail dropping (no small polygons rendered?) when the model is moving in realtime, but it still looks fine.

I would love to hear more technical details from the sophie people it if they're not too private.