konan opened this issue on Mar 19, 2001 ยท 27 posts
Flickerstreak posted Thu, 22 March 2001 at 6:34 PM
I wish you the best of luck, Konan! If you could do this, the Bryce world will be turned on its head! I imagine you'll make a lot of money (assuming it's in the same price range as your truePose and PoseMax products) for only a week or two's work! Just want to point out a few things that I hope you're aware of (and are the principle reasons no one has been able to do this successfully yet): (a) in Bryce, poser objects are imported as several distinct meshes. (b) in Bryce, meshes cannot change shape over time in animations. To achieve this, you would have to have 1 mesh for each frame, which would be prohibitive for file size considerations. The only object shape property which can be animated is scaling and shear. (c) in Bryce, all meshes must exist for the entire duration of the animation, and are always visible on-screen when working with the scene. This means that if you choose to follow route (b) above, all the individual meshes from each frame will be visible simultaneously. There's no real way to hide them in Bryce, except using Solo Mode, which is a user tool not an importer's tool. (d) Materials import from Poser to Bryce is time-consuming, non-trivial, and cannot be scripted. I think the materials all have to be rotated, and the transmaps have to be inverted. (e) the Bryce .obp and .br4 native binary object formats are not published. There is no way to create a .obp file or .br4 file given a poser file (unless you've somehow deciphered them: if so please publish the specifications you've figured out, there are a lot of people who have been dying to make converters for a wide variety of stuff). (f) You can't import keyframes or positions/rotations/sizes with an object: the user must assign keyframes and position. All imported objects appear either in world center or in the middle of the screen (preferences). The exception is if you can somehow put it in a .br4 file. (g) Bryce does not import animations from any known format, including 3ds, poser, truespace, or anything like that. (h) Bryce has no scripting interface, like VBscript or AppleScript. I hate to be a party-pooper, but if you're thinking you can just take your existing Poser format parser and somehow magically create a "Bryce animation format" file, you're going to be disappointed. Details of Bryce's animation-capable file formats are not available. -flick