.3ds Import and Bloom Test

[Darkwing]

This is a test of importing some .3ds ships into AM. The blooms were originally gonna be done in AM (finally figured out how to use AM composite and was quite impressed) however, I liked the blooms in FCE more, so I went with those blooms instead. But the lens dirt and all that are AM, so yeah, have a look see

 

 

EDIT- Whoops, I always forget this place doesn't have a youtube embed, I'm so used to putting in the tags

[Gerry]

Hey Chris, that's one of the most dramatic animation tests I've ever seen! Great music and title treatment dude!

[Darkwing]

Thanks, it's also one of the only animation tests I've ever done. The amount of animating I've done with AM you can probably count on your fingers. But yeah, this just demonstrates the possibility of using Props to import .3ds models. There's some tweaking, like in Max the parts that have glows need to be made separate materials so that I can use the Glow and ambience property in AM. The dirty lens was one of the trickier things, but thanks to Rob and his hint to use translucency made things a lot simpler

[robcat2075]

Polygons in A:M! And still the Republic stands. And Canada too.

[Gerry]

Wow I was so impressed I completely forgot this was a 3DS import test. That's really cool because I am cramming on 3DS tutorials for the day job, we have it installed on our machines but in a pinch I always default to AM. However awhile back we got some AutoCad files from a client that had to be animated and I really fell down on the job because I didn't feel confident enough to jump into it, so we had to bring in a freelancer on very short notice. Can't let that happen again, so I've been doing all these online tutorials and getting up to speed. Just another tool in the toolbelt.

[Darkwing]

Yeah, the big thing is that the model has no other elements with it. I imported a .3ds star destroyer once and AM nearly killed me in hatred, why? The .3ds file had both a camera and light in it. Of course the biggest problem is the textures. Where Max uses one material that houses all the maps for on part of the model, AM will only read one map and make it a diffuse map. So if the 3ds material also had a spec and ambience or self illum map, AM only reads one. And of course in the choreography you can do a basic edit of each of the materials assigned to the model, that's how the Enterprise was able to have glows on the nacelles, they had their own separate material so I was able to just add ambience and glow in AM. The Valiant however only had 3 materials for the whole model and to make the engines glow would have made parts of the hull glow as well thanks to UV mapping. So like I said, needs some more tests like breaking the .3ds models up further in Max and then re-importing, but overall it looks like there is much potential to get it working well enough that an untrained eye wouldn't know the difference

 

EDIT: One other note, the less dense the mesh the easier it works with AM. These were game models converted to .3ds format so the density of the mesh is more or less low, whereas part of my problem with the Star Destroyer I mentioned earlier was that it was extraordinarily dense, nice model, well detailed, but again, AM wanted to either murder me or commit suiced