By Mark Richards (Wotamess) (62.31.93.72) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 12:28 pm:

possibly a stupid question but most of mine are:

Ive gotta come up with a 3d representation of a famous office building for a broadband interface/navigation, erm any ideas on the best way to get it as cleanly as possible from LW into Flash without me crying??

By Jeff (Pixelmonk1) (156.80.138.138) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 12:55 pm:

you can use Swift 3D for LW or find an editing/compositing package that outputs .SWF files. After Effects is one such package.

By Jeff (Pixelmonk1) (156.80.138.138) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 12:56 pm:

you can use Swift 3D for LW or find an editing/compositing package that outputs .SWF files. After Effects is one such package.

By Mark Richards (Wotamess) (62.31.93.72) on Friday, January 24, 2003 - 11:30 am:

Ta very much, that should do it

By Michael Ross (Mikefrhowetx) (209.151.96.69) on Friday, January 24, 2003 - 11:07 pm:

If you want to apply FlashMX actionScript methods for user interaction you will need to convert it to vector format (for symbols). A cheap video vector encoder and the ONLY one I found is Flix http://www.wildform.com/ . A Flix review can be found here http://www.kirupa.com/reviews/flixpro.asp and they have a watermark demo. What I have seen of Swift3d’s 3d (**emulation), I would rather save the $300 and buy DirectorMX for a true interactive 3d world that works with flash communication server.
Good Luck Mike

By Mike Matura (Golgor) (12.88.180.131) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 10:18 pm:

That would depend on what exactly you want / need to do, and how large it has to be ( on screen image )

You can simply import bitmaps into flash. If objects are complex you may end up with a larger file size using vectors. Bitmap renders always look much better than vectors ( I think we all agree on that one )

Swift 3D site has an example of a spaceship going around in circles. That file is 2 MB and has no interaction at all.

For comparison here is a fully functional Flash game with all bitmaps, comes out to less than 1/2 the file size.

http://www.deusx.com/football

Swift ( or any vector conversions ) is pretty much a waste of time and money unless you are using very simple objects. It may work in your case if it's a simple representation of a building and you can apply some rotation, zoom in or out, but otherwise............. I find it silly to spend $1500 on Lightwave and its rendering engine , only to butcher it with a cheap vector program.

By Michael Ross (Mikefrhowetx) (209.151.96.69) on Sunday, January 26, 2003 - 04:02 pm:

Nice soccer game Mike, however I believe the players are vectors with gradients on top a bitmap background. To bad we can’t see the fla file for a tutorial? It took 48meg of memory and 50-85% CPU usage on a 1.4 ghz AMD with 1gig mem. I wrote a PPC flash to php-mysql program with bitmaps converted to vector images and had to drop them for simple vectors due to slow data response on a 400mz Axim. This pixel-vector lowering too the lowest denominator (PPC) is giving me a headache and making my LW skills near useless. Maybe in the future when desktop CPUs are 3-4ghz and PDAs are 1-1.5ghz with faster GPUs these bitmap-to-vector programs will come to more usefulness. Broadband it there already. Mike