Here is the question:
We do have to do a project where somebody is going to be in a space, move around some things in real time, walk through the space in real time.
The first taughts we had for that was a gaming engine, or VRML viewer ( QTVR is not an option as we do need to navigate through the space, not just a pretty zooming around thing) The problem we do have with that is that this product needs to be photoreal.. The client saw our Vray rendered animation and stills and expects the same thing for this “application”.
I do understand that Vray is no good for baking texture or other “get out of max” things.
We must keep the level of quality really high
Any suggestions would be appreciated
All of the real time solutions that I’ve seen leave a lot to be desired when compared to Vray, but what can we expect? The advantage of QTVR and similar technologies are that they deliver the same quality as the rendering engine used to create them.
There are several VR authoring packages that allow you to create visible links you can click on which will for example take you into the next room when clicking on a door. The link appears as an icon in a scene that takes you to another scene. You pan back and forth or look up and down or zoom. It’s really more of an interactive animation. You don’t have to render out very many frames to get reasonably smooth camera movement and the quality is as good as a full blown Vray rendering. You can also render out higher res images then what you might normally see with a realtime engine or animation say 1024x768. It takes a little getting used to but once you understand it you can achieve a lot with a little creativity.
VRML is a good choice now that it supports lightmapping, DX9 shaders etc… But you can also encrypt your content, use stereoscopic glass etc…
One VRML viewer is very fast (lot of optimizations like you can find in game engine), and has amazing rendering feature : BSContact.
VRay can output radiosity lightmap directly from the Render to Texture panel and this lightmap can be directly used into the vrml viewer and the final result can be very very good.
I will post some screen shots but I miss time for now sorry
In order to export lightmaps from max you need the BSExporter (that is not free for max but it is for Blender).
Once lightmpa is computed, your need to convert all your scene to standard material and put your textures in diffuse slot with UV cord 1 and the lightmap in specular slot (or different one and it will create a different< blending mode inside the vrml viewer) with different UV cord typicaly the UV coord previously generated with automatic mapping things.
Then inside the BSExporter for max you must choose “use multitexturing” and also check use multitextcoord.
Then export, then view it inside BSContact (6.2 version now supports DX9 Pixel and Vertex Shaders )
yep I will make some screen shots, but please keep in mind that what you will see has been made for an Internet use and so, all the textures, geometry are heavily compressed.
Visual quality could be much higher for offline solutions (using DDS textures rather than jpg etc…)
@s0real
The standard max’s vrml exporter doesnt supports multitexturing you need the BSExporter to do that.
well…the BSexporter seams a bit expensive for exporting to an open standard… though some people say its worth the price…
i’ve done multitextured vrml’s with lightmaps for testing purposes by hand following these instructions:
it’s a real pain, cause max spoils the uv sets and u have to reimport both sets (diffuse and lightmaps) as 3ds and reexport as vrml to get clean uv’s and then comp them togehther in a texteditor. but it works.
there is also dave’s vrml exporter which claim to be able to export multitextured vrml. it exports 2 textures, but both textures use the same uv set.
i’ve tried to convince him to fix that, but he didn’t see the point yet. http://darendash.home.comcast.net/MaxExporter.html
i’ve done multitextured vrml’s with lightmaps for testing purposes by hand following these instructions: web3d-fr.com
it’s a real pain, cause max spoils the uv sets and u have to reimport both sets (diffuse and lightmaps) as 3ds and reexport as vrml to get clean uv’s and then comp them togehther in a texteditor. but it works.
You are wrong : BSExporter supports multiple UV sets per geometry. (read my previous post)
For “basic” lightmapping : diffuse textures + lightmap you dont need any manual editing.
