17th February 2008, 06:15 PM | #31 | |
Senior Member
Professional user
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Posts: 917
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Re: Hello & Questions
You're most welcome!
Yes, Bryce is a good choice. Lots of folks here use it and like it a lot. If you feel like experimenting, here is a list of other external renderers: http://www.independentdeveloper.com/...rendering_soft EDIT: for the curious, when I'm not writing my own shaders, I do most of my renders with POV-Ray or occassionally Poser Quote:
The maps themselves are applied in your renderer. You can apply a diffuse map in AC3D from the Object > Texture menu. This is a good idea even if you plan to apply all your maps in your renderer, just to make sure the texture coordinates look right. Also, some of the file exporters won't export the texture coordinates unless you have a texture applied in AC3D. You're right, most of the maps you make in a paint program. A few of them, like normal maps, can be tricky to make by hand. These are usually made by taking a high-resolution model, writing the normals to a texture map, then apply the normal map to a lower-resolution version of the same model. Those tools luuckyy mentioned--Nvidia Melody and ATI NormalMapper--can be used for this task. You'll find a plug-in to export AC3D files to the NormalMapper utility here: http://www.independentdeveloper.com/...l-map-exporter Oh, and thanks luuckyy for the link to crazybump! Never seen it before but it looks like a really useful tool; I'm download it as we speak. Last edited by lisa; 17th February 2008 at 06:48 PM. |
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