Jude opened this issue on Feb 26, 2000 ยท 12 posts
Jude posted Sat, 26 February 2000 at 6:22 PM
Hi PhilC, I got the program from http://www.xdsoft.com/ It's trialware, and I think it's fully functional even when unregistered. It just has a nag screen that comes up every time you do a save. It doesn't look like a program for converting object formats. The UI is more oriented toward browsing. It has a rather fast draft-quality render, and will even make thumbnails from a set of object files. When you have an object file selected, you get a display with info about the object and a quick rendering. You can do a File -> Save, and that gets you to the dialog that allows you to select the desired output format, and also some options. The things that usually screw up a morph target are unwanted changes in position and scale. When trueSpace imports a .OBJ file, the default operation is to scale it to a convenient size and move it to the center of the workspace. Either spells disaster for a morph target. If you turn them off, the imported object from Poser is too small for conventient manipulation. You can scale it up, but this must be done carefully because you need to scale it back down by exactly the same amount going back to Poser. BUT - trueSpace doesn't export .OBJ, and Poser doesn't read .COB That's where 3D Exploration came in. It reads and writes both .COB and .OBJ (and a bunch more). I also has a "transform" dialog when you save that allows scaling, rotations, position shift, and shear to be done. One of the new things the author added was two more ways to specify the scaling amount. It used to have a percentage, and he added "multiply by" and "divide by". I usually use a multiply factor between 10 and 20 going from Poser to trueSpace, and I divide by the same amount going back. The other new option was a checkbox to enable/disable automatic centering of the object during conversion. Be sure to disable wheb converting morph targets. Jude More info at jude@sprynet.com