The Shockwave 3D* Scene Export Options dialog box allows you to:
Select the scene assets to be written to the .w3d file
Optionally preview the scene to be exported
Optionally view a diagnostic display of the space taken by all scene assets in .w3d file
Optionally view diagnostic messages about possible authoring problems in the scene
Previews the scene as it has been captured by the Shockwave 3D Exporter. This allows you to quickly identify scene elements that are not supported by the Shockwave 3D Exporter.
Note: The preview window may display scene resources you decided not to export and is not completely accurate with light, texture, material, and shader resources. Keep in mind that this display reflects the scene captured by the exporter, and not necessarily the one written to the .w3d file. For example, deselecting Textures & Shaders in the exporter dialogue still renders in preview. Also, some 3ds max 4 W3D export options are always enabled. The "Light resources" should be considered as always enabled. The "Material resources" should be considered as always enabled.
The following options control how the entire 3ds max 4* scene is exported to the Shockwave 3D file. For most exports, leave all the options selected. This exports all scene assets into a single file. To create a library of bitmap images or animations to extend an existing 3D cast member in Macromedia Director*, create a scene in 3ds max 4 with these scene assets, and then select only the export options that will export those elements.
Shockwave 3D collects similar scene assets into collections or tables called palettes. The options selected determine which palettes are written to the Shockwave 3D file.
Note: The preview window will always show an entire scene, including the resources disabled for export. Even if Shaders, Texture map resources, or Material resources is not selected, it still appears in the preview window; if Geometry resources is not selected, the preview will show a black screen; and if Animations is not selected, no animation will appear in the scene. In all cases, the proper data will be written to the .w3d file, except for the scene disabled resources.
Exports all meshes and their associated Bipeds to the Shockwave 3D file. If this option is cleared, the preview window will be completely black. All other selected resources will be written to the .w3d file.
Exports all shaders in the Shockwave 3D file. Shaders are the highest-level entities that describe surface properties. They bear no relationship to the "Shaders" used in 3ds max 4. Shockwave 3D does not distinguish between Blinn, Phong, Anisotropic, or any other "shader" algorithm that determines the rendered look of materials and maps. Only Gouraud shading, which is most closely emulated by the Blinn and Phong shaders in 3ds max 4, is supported. Shockwave 3D shaders are primarily pointers to texture map resources and material resources, which are exported by the next two options.
Note: This option should be used in conjunction with the Texture map resources and Material resource options. If this option is cleared, models will be invisible when first loaded into Director, because they will have no shading information (despite their being visible and fully shaded in the preview window). Once shaders are assigned to the models with Lingo*, the models will become visible and look properly shaded.
Exports all texture maps associated with all objects supported by the
exporter to the Shockwave 3D file. Texture maps in Shockwave 3D are
bitmap images or 2D procedural maps, such as Checker and Gradient
Ramp. All bitmap images used in 3ds max 4 are transformed by
Shockwave 3D into streaming JPEG images.
Note: The terms
"Texture," "Map," and "Texture Map" are
used interchangeably. If this option is cleared, models will be
untextured when first loaded into Director, because they will have no
texture information (despite their being visible and fully shaded in
the preview window). Once textures are assigned to the proper shaders
with Lingo, the models will look properly textured.
Exports all basic materials associated with all objects supported by the exporter to the Shockwave 3D file. Materials represent the most basic properties that can be assigned to a surface, such as diffuse color, opacity, and specular color. In 3ds max 4's Material Editor, this includes the settings under the Blinn Basic Parameters rollout.
We strongly recommend that you leave the option selected when exporting any geometry, shader, or texture map resources. Clear this option only when exporting just the animation in a scene; otherwise, the .w3d file will not work correctly with Director.
Exports all lights in the scene to the Shockwave 3D file. Clearing this option doesn't do anything unless the scenegraph hierarchy option is also cleared. The only time this option should be cleared is when exporting just the animation, geometry, or texture data in a scene.
Writes out the animation on all objects supported by the exporter to the Shockwave 3D file. The preview window is useful in quickly showing which animations the exporter is capturing.
By default, the Shockwave 3D Exporter captures the animation of all objects in the scene in every frame. This data is compressed into a streaming format as the file is written. There may be times, however, when you only want to capture part of an animation, or sample it more coarsely than once a frame.
If this option is cleared, the full scene will be displayed in the preview window without any animations.
Note: Animation export compression collapses non-Biped-based hierarchies (simple linked hierarchies in 3ds max 4), so only animation assigned to the root exports properly. For example, in a simple head animation where the eyes and eyelids are linked to the skull, the skull movements export but the eye and eyelid animations do not. Because 3ds max 4 Groups do not collapse on export, you should link each element of the chain, group each element individual from child to parent, reset the pivot, and then animate each group.
Controls whether or not the parent-child hierarchy between all geometry, light, group, and camera resources are written to the Shockwave 3D file. This option should always be selected when exporting an entire scene from 3ds max 4. The Shockwave 3D scenegraph contains:
Information on parent-child relationships.
Information about what resources each scene element uses (for example, the model resource used by a model in the scenegraph).
Controls for any modifiers associated with the geometry resources.
Information about any cameras, lights, and groups in the scene. Shockwave 3D treats cameras, lights, and groups as less important resources, and stores information about them only in the scenegraph.
The scenegraph hierarchy is the glue that binds most of the scene assets in the Shockwave 3D file (.w3d). If the option is cleared, only shader, texture, model, and motion resources will be written to the .w3d file, and all the other information that specifies how objects exist in the scene, how the scene is laid out, how the scene is lit, and how the scene is viewed will be missing. For this reason, clear this option only when exporting libraries of animations or texture maps.
Note: The exporter will remember this setting from one export to the next. Be sure to set this option again before trying to export an entire scene. If you do not, the result will be unusable (except as an object and texture library).
The Animation Options box contains the controls to change how an animation is captured. The Sampling Interval control is used to capture object animation once every specified number of frames. The Animation Range Start and End controls indicate which frames of the scene animations are to be captured. By default these values are set to capture the entire animation interval specified in 3ds max 4, sampling all animations in the scene every frame.
The Shockwave 3D file contains all scene assets in a proprietary compressed and streaming format. You can control the order in which data streams with the user properties. The amount of compression of the scene assets is set by three controls: Geometry, Texture, and Animation Quality. The controls have values that range from 0.1 to 100.0, with higher values giving less compression and better quality (a more faithful representation of the original model).
A value of 100 means that the scene assets will be represented at the best quality possible, but with some degree of compression still present. It does not represent the value at which compression does not occur. Also, the compression controls do not have a linear scale, so a setting of 20.0 doesn't necessarily mean that the quality level of the resulting data is twice as good as that produced with a setting of 10.0.
Controls how much the scene geometry data (vertex positions and normals, texture coordinates, etc.) is compressed. The default of 10.0 generally produces a good compromise between data accuracy and space savings.
Controls the compression of textures (images) in the scene.
Animation quality controls the compression of animation data in the scene. Higher compression levels (lower quality) tend to remove the finer motions authored in the scene, especially motion-capture data, while occasionally introducing small noise artifacts.
Note: You may need to use larger values of the Animation Sampling Interval control along with higher values of this setting to minimize the file space consumed by animation while still maintaining acceptable motions.
The texture size limits options allow you to reduce the size of the .w3d file by limiting the size of the texture maps in the export. The default No limits on texture size option exports all texture maps in the scene at the full resolution of the image as used in 3ds max 4. For example, a 2048 X 4096 pixel image will be written to the .w3d file at these dimensions (compressed, of course).
The 512 by 512 pixels maximum option exports the texture maps so that no image exceeds 512 X 512 pixels. A 2048 X 4096 pixel image will be scaled to a 512 X 512 pixel image; a 128 X 1024 pixel image will be scaled to a 128 X 512 pixel image.
The 256 by 256 pixels maximum exports the texture maps so that no image exceeds 256 X 256 pixels. A 2048 X 4096 pixel image will be scaled to 256 X 256 pixels; a 128 X 1024 pixel image will be scaled to 128 X 256 pixel image.
The reduced size of the texture maps will usually look fine on the model, because the model's UVW texture coordinates will have already taken into account the non-square size of the image. Use the smaller settings if, after tuning the compression settings and simplifying the scene in 3ds max 4, the .w3d file is still too large. If the scene contains no textures, or only small textures, these options will not help to reduce the size of the .w3d file.
This option can be used to prevent the writing of geometry data used by some of the more advanced Shockwave 3D technologies, and thus reduce the overall file size.
If the checkbox is cleared, Toon and Subdivision Surfaces (SDS) data is not included in the export file, which means that the Toon and Subdivision Surfaces modifiers cannot be applied to the model in Director*. A model missing this geometry data can be used with all other Shockwave 3D technologies, however. This option should remain selected unless it is expedient to reduce the size of the .w3d file.
Note: There is no way to tell if a .w3d file was exported with this option enabled or disabled until you try to apply the Toon or SDS modifiers. For this reason it is highly recommended that you use a special naming convention to indicate that a model doesn't have the Toon/SDS data in it.
This option will open a window after the exporter preview window appears (if the View W3D scene after export option has also been selected), displaying how scene assets take up space in the .w3d file, and how much of the file has to load before the scene will become visible in Shockwave.
This option will open a window displaying warning messages about possible problems found converting the scene to the .w3d file format. These messages, which do not necessarily indicate problems with the scene, can be useful in debugging problems such as why the scene looks different in the preview window than it does in 3ds max 4. If there is any feature in 3ds max 4 that is not supported by the exporter, it will be listed here.
*See asterisked (*) statement at Legal Information © 2001 Intel Corporation.