Hey everyone, I've been doing some modeling in Amapi (nothing spectacular) and they are either exporting weird or importing weird, as in umsmoothed...I did some urns early on and exported as 3ds and they looked fine importing into Bryce, lately I did a bunch and exported as obj and they import ok, they just can't be smoothed...anyone run into this? on export I get a 'do you want to save NURBS as OBJ NURBS, yes or no', I don't know that it makes a difference, does it? To illustrate, below....

What do you think is happening, I need your expert opinions on this to fix it...:(

Bryce's smooth is not altering the mesh density. It just creates a sort of gradient. The smooth that you used in amapi is a mesh smooth. It subdivides the whole mesh, resulting in a higher polygon count and less jagged edges. From what I've seen in your screenshots I'd say you'd best load the low-res mesh in Amapi. Apply the smooth to it, but smooth it a bit less strongly then you did in the 2nd screenshot, because otherwise the polygon count is unneccesarily high. Then you should export the Amapi smoothed mesh and import that one into bryce. Then run bryce's smooth and you should have a nice non-jagged urn. You should always try to find a compromise between detail and polygon count. As soon as you don't see any clearly jagged edges in the render the smooth is strong enough. If you smooth even stronger after that you add unneccesary complexity wich will increase export time, import time, open time, save time and render time and wireframe update time. In other words everything gets unneccesary slower.

680 polys doesn't seem much to me - I'm sure you can increase that to sort the problem

680 isn't the high-res one, but the low-res un meshsmoothed version. My quess is that the one in screenshot 2 (post 3) has got 43520 poly's (one polygon from the low-res subdivided to 8x8 poly's).

Hmmmm, so what I'm guesing is, the export is not working correctly in Amapi for objs, a 3ds not only smooths in Amapi and exports that way but also is smoothable (is that a word?) in Bryce....seems Amapi is not exporting the hi-res object...?

If amapi is not exporting th high-res version then it's probably a problem with the dynamic geometry (or however eovia called it in the manual). After you smoothed an object you can still work on the low res "cage". I think that cage is exported instead of the subdivided model. To get rid of the low-res cage you select a tool for instance the tool that allows you to move one point (the 8th icon from above on the right row of the toolset). You will get a little menu or a group of icons. One of those icons is a red highres wireframe shaded vase. If you click on that one your model should lose it's low-res cage. If you do this you can't edit the low-res cage anymore because it's gone, but the highres object should export fine now.

What's more, obj is not exactly susceptible to smoothing in Bryce. If you don't intend to create a texture map in UV Mapper, I'd suggest either 3ds or lwo. And lwo can be smoothed more, so you can use less polygons. At least in my experience, though I'm ceretain somebody will pop up with the opposite one. :-)

This is very interesting and I have a question for you Erlik, can Bryce import lwo directly? I've always converted the lwo to 3ds before importing into Bryce because I thought that Bryce wouldn't import them. Catlin

As far as I know Bryce imports LWO's just fine. I think it even exports it.

I thought I remembered reading a thread in here not to long ago that Bryce would only import .lwo if that .lwo was version 6 or later. I went searching for the thread but couldn't find it. This made sense to me because some .lwo that I have downloaded I can export just fine but others I can't.

ooops, that "export" should read import.

Interesting, Bryce can import .lwo/.lws files but can oly export as .lws

Ah, maybe that's why I thought Bryce couldn't import lwo's. Catlin

nahh..I've imported .lwo files generated in Terragen, with no real problems (in the import process, they did come out 2-dimensional, and a bit small, but they were useable..;). Strangely enough, I've never exported from Bryce, it's usually the destination..;) I've tried smoothing in modelling programs, but the size increases dramatically (my infamous 40-meg A-bomb prop..yes, you heard right, 40 meg..;). You're a dang sight better in Amapi than me..;)

I did it as lwo and it imports fine, except it takes forever for Bryce to 'prepare objects', my guess is that lwo has way more info for Bryce to sort thru than 3ds or obj...Rayraz, I'll look to see that dynamic geometry is turned on and also try your method to delete the low-res object, see what happens...

Interesting. My experience with lwo is that it comes out smaller and usually imports into Bryce faster. Which of course depends on the number of polygons. The worst offender is certainly obj.

43000 polys is way more than needed. Usually for an object like that, 15,000 before export is fine. Then a smooth at 45 degrees will smooth things out nicely. Of course a more complex object, like a person, will need more polygons because of the more complex shapes. Stay away from nurbs. DO not export as obj, as Erlik said obj does not smooth well. (and obj is a bigger filesize)

Preparing the objects takes a lot of time when you are using DXF or LWO. Lower polygon-counts are faster on the import. I also use truespace .cob-format sometimes. It imports way faster. one disadvantage of Amapi's .cob export is that it exports all the hidden parts and curves you used to create your model too. you'll have to delete those before you export or after you import. Also be sure to first ungroup everything in amapi and then set all the parts you want to export in one group before you export to .cob format, because otherwise you might get several objects merged to one wich can sometimes be irritating during texturing.