Let's start this up again

𝗜𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗮 𝗼𝗳 𝗧𝗮𝗹𝗸𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗰𝘀, 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝗮𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗮 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗮 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗱𝗲.


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That’s both sick and wrong.



I’ve been working with modeling and rendering software (oh, and animation) for about as long as I’ve been using Xara Designer. And I’m still a journeyman at both.
As a “Roaming Moderator” on TG, I think I could get a little more enthusiasm and participation here because 1.) 3D is really cool. Has everyone experimented with Xara Designer’s Extrude too and/or the standalone animation program?

2.) Getting into professional level 3D will not break your budget. While Cinema 4D, 3D studio and the like have driven their prices up to two to three figures for a subscription (I detest SubscriptionWare)—Blender is free, always has been, and while you need t buy a $eparate module to do particle effects, Blends comes with a rather excellent fluid dynamics, explosions, clouds and other particle effects. It’s rendering engine is pretty darned good, too—I’ve been using Maxwell Render forever, and I have to hand it to the collaborative effort that goes into Blender.

3.) My third reason for typing all of this here is that increasingly, the companies who manufacture mega-capable programs with industrial-strength price tags are creating “lesser Gods”—free versions of the complete programs, with a limited, but not terribly crippled feature set. You can download “starter sets” from 3D Coat, zBrush (now part of MAXON/Cinema4D), and AutoDesk, all sculpting programs, with export options such as OBJ, a very commonplace file format for 3D.

Also, you might be able to find Adobe Dimensions, currently woven into Illustrator, for $3 or so on eBay, as orphanware goes. The neat thing about Dimensions is that it can render and extruded shape and a lathe one (think of a potter’s wheel) as vector shapes, not bitmaps as Xara Graphics produces. You might even be able to find a copy of CorelDRAW version(s) 2 and up for a pittance online (I’m thinking search Amazon) because Corel Corporation tends not to burn its back inventory with the release of a new version.
This is a sufficiently long, hopefully not excruciatingly long re-introduction to this forum. By all means, ask away! How does one begin conceptually? How steep are learning curves? That sort of stuff.

I hope to see y’all along the x, y, or z axis,

My Best,


Gary

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Gary, thank you for filling what has been a 3D void.

I have Blender (for free, as you said) through use of PortableApps.com so it runs from a stick.

I have Xara's 3D Make7, which should be free as MagiXara have not updated it for a decade.
It produces animated GIF but nothing else that I know of to bring it into my XDA.
I appreciate that many 3D graphics will end up being a one-way street as once it is in the XDA, it stops being editable - unless you know better.

I have the most fun with ZBrushCoreMini 2021.
I still don't know how to excavate a blob.

No mention of 3D CAD or of MS 3D Viewer.

I'm sure I've other apps just waiting to be released.

Acorn

Hi Acorn—

I commiserate with you that there doesn’t appear to be any easy way to “Drill” or “excavate” into a surface in zBrush mini core. If there were a negative value possible for the “pulling” tools, then you could push and displace an area, as you could in Sculptris, which was a free program zBrush bought and then made un-free ☹. If you look around, you might be able to find a copy of Sculptris, and as with any program that has any worthwhile features, you can export your results to something exchangeable with other programs…OBJ is not as robust as FBX, but but Sculptris and Mini core can export to OBJ.

That said, I think with the exception of brush tools found in larger modeling software (Cinema 4D comes to mind), there is another approach: Boolean operations. Boolean merging, subtracting and so on should be familiar with Xaraist…it’s just that the operations are performed on 2D shapes rather than 3D objects in modeling programs.

The attached image is my attempt at poking a hole clear through a sphere, and mostly failing, using Sculptris, and then and example of Boolean subtraction to get a “hole” in a primitive.

I think I’ll try to get into what a parametric surface is in my next post. Just about all the modeling programs out there (not CAD, but modeling) approximate a surface, and you crank up the resolution to make smooth surfaces. You’ll see straight vectors around a sphere, for example, that has a very low approximation of the surface.

My Best,

Gary

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Thanks Gary, it's not as scary as I thought.
At its simplest, an OBJ file and a MTL file with reference to texture files.

I have been rendering into a web page using Three.js but it is a shedload of code at the moment.

Early days.

Acorn

Here is my approach to get a Blender file to render in a web page:

• Unzip Attachment 132558
• Add Attachment 132559 & Attachment 132560 into the just-created THREE - Windmill_xar_files folder.
• It is messy as TG would accept too large a file.
• It is not my design but i kept if to line up with the following tutorial.

I worked through most of https://r105.threejsfundamentals.org...-load-obj.html to get something that worked.

Changing the unpacked .Blender files was tricky to say the least.
Getting them to play nice in Xara was harder.

I failed to render the back of the sails as I think I lost one of the textures.

I finally discovered that you cannot animate .OBJ files as everything is one lump.
I was amazed that the texture files are so big. The XAR file is all of 24kB.
I now have a use for Filer Forge 11 that I purchased a few months ago.

Moving on to gLTF files and learning about textures and texture atlases.

Acorn

You've outdone yourself, Acorn.


That is, I'm completely baffled over what you did: your method, as you described in your link above, is intended to allow a Web page to feature an object, not just as an image, but one that can be viewed from many angles? Not sure how Xara Designer enters the picture. :) !

I've seen rendered objects that can be rotated and stuff in (almost) real time on free and commercial model stores on the Web. Here's one such if this is related to your work...

SketchFab usually free models

Attachment 132561

That said, I took the liberty and I hope you don't mind, of doing something leagues less ambitious; I just rendered the windmill, with JPEG image maps attached correctly, did a little color correction and found the appropriate Getty image. The wavy reflection is Flaming Pear's Flood filter.


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Both your approach and what I do are valid and interesting things to do in a 3D realm.

We have almost 100 hits in three days and no one has hopped in yet. Folks, post anything related to 3D that you like (SFW, okay?), that you'd like to talk about, and help us breathe some air into this forum.

I will try tomorrow to post a somewhat advanced tutorial on how to use the 3D Extrude tool to create a toy train.

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[ ] Yay?

[ ] Nay?

[ ] None of the below.


;) g

Quote:

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Here is my approach to get a Blender file to render in a web page:

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I'm in awe Acorn. Great stuff. I've dabbled with Blender over a few years but I find I'm forgetting more than I can remember.

Gary, I decided i wanted to present future 3D model that I design into a web page. I didn't want to just output static views (planes or cars).
My approach allows the viewer to zoom, pan & rotate without the need of a rendering engine, application or other web resource.

Here is what I did, published on-line: http://acorn.xara.hosting/windmill/.

I like your placing of the windmill against a image background.
I was working up to the background being a cubemap and also to animate the sails.

I have a friend who designs totally immersive aircraft simulators where you can make the cockpit transparent to export the wiring loom for maintenance or render every room in an apartment block for sales viewing where the cupboards open and the washing machine cycles.

Acorn

:cool:

Yeah. That's beyond me, Acorn. I definitely appreciate what is for me an extraordinarily elegant for a custom solution! When I want to reveal more than a static view, I animate. I tend to like to do "push-throughs" at low angles and such.

I want to thank you so very much for opening our 3D discussions and advice in a direction that I'd say is mind-blowing without fear of contradiction!

As I'd mentioned earlier, I'm going to break out of this thread to offer a PDF tutorial because multiple screen caps and multiple posts suck. Focus is the 3D Extrude tool, just a jumping off point (or "climbing aboard") for other explorations.


Attachment 132566

Gary, in your unintended absence, I have met my own 'mind-blowing' experience with https://doc.babylonjs.com.

The effort put into the tutorials is brilliant and the ability to alter and tweak to destruction, brilliant.
A small example: https://playground.babylonjs.com/#7G0IQW.

Meshes can be imported from Blend

I've managed getting some of them to run in a Xara website but I am still experimenting...

Acorn

I'm very weak, but getting better, George. Thank you for sharing what looks like a totally awesome, off-the-charts piece of geometry and animation capabilities.

Did I get it right? :)

I have something far less ambitious, but a core capability of Xara, that at very least should be entertaining/educational. That's what I do. :)

My Best,

Gary


P.S. This is something I worked on because COVID caught up with us. Rather bucolic and boring, isn't it? Simple subjects and compositions can be harder to pull off than fantasy stuff, because it has its roots in reality, that, with the exception of a few politicians, is what we live in.


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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gare

Simple subjects and compositions can be harder to pull off than fantasy stuff, because it has its roots in reality, that, with the exception of a few politicians, is what we live in.


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Not that I think you were poking at me with the fantasy comment. While some of my work is waaay over the top, nearly all of it is tied to reality in some way. Fantasy doesn't work if you cannot get past a suspension of disbelief, and to accomplish that, there needs to be a tie to reality. Consider my last fantasy illustration posted in my thread, which I happen to have tweaked last night and in the last few hours of rendering the final image now. It's a cluster of asteroids held together by the webs of massive spiders living in space. If you can accept the notion that lifeforms can live in open space, even perhaps some kind of alien spider, then seeing the science of using strong webs to hold asteroids together makes some kind of sense. Someone suggested - wouldn't it be cool of trails of webbings hundreds of miles long connected the spider's nest to nearby larger asteroids to create large web nets to catch passing small asteroids, and potentially passing starships - to make for an interesting threat to adventurers. The webbing shown in the illustration looks real, despite it being fantasy.

It takes a lot of contemplation, between imagination and what is acceptable to others' realities. Not every fantasy works, unless it's intrinsically tied to reality somehow.

wot ?

do you own the definition of fantasy... I don't think so

No, and am certainly suggesting that. Rather, I continue to post fantasy content regularly on the boards, and thought it might have reflected my work - although I certainly don't know that for certain, hence why I hinted that it could be the case... I'd say the majority of 3D content isn't strictly for fantasy. Most of the world's engineering today is done in 3D first, for example.

I draw cartoons - most of it is political, all of it is fantasy, all of it is rooted in the real world

more routed in the real world I would suggest than guys living out life-escaping fantasy with role playing games

of course that is only my opinion...

why do you think Gary should be negative to your work - your work is excellent within it's context...

I don't think Gary think's negatively. Some may think that working in fantasy is some kind of design choice to avoid reality. I was just saying that fantasy must be directly tied to reality in some way, otherwise any suspension of disbelief regarding a fantasy scene requires that sense of realism, or it generally fails.

Hi GamePrinter—

I was poking at absolutely no one. I'm very careful how I phrase a comment; I wrote that simple compositions *can* be harder to pull off, not "or", or even "should".

I do plenty of fantasy compositions, and abstract, anywhere my skills and imagination can take me.

Please forgive my comments if you feel I was specifically knocking a genre, I'm not. I'm still a little woozy from COVID and perhaps I should resist posting until I'm feeling more together.

Here's to unreal :)


Attachment 132685

—g

My life is a fantasy. I do not exist IRL.

Also I would not even begin to know where to start in a 3D program.

You could begin reality by subscribing to the NYT, oG.

Oog

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gwpriester

I would not even begin to know where to start in a 3D program.

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Gary, I too have limited experience but try to follow the stages in this set of documentation: https://doc.babylonjs.com/journey/theFirstStep.

Whatever you create, we can include into a Xara website design.
Unpack and run Attachment 132688.
I put the 3D skull in a pop-up layer so you can time how long it takes to load.

Acorn

Seriously, oG, you already own a fair starting tool, the Extrude tool.

Making interesting shapes, first of all, is easier if you pose the object in perspective, so you can see parts of all three facing sides. Second, the extrude doesn't need to be the depth axis. For example, to create a tube. extrude the letter "o", and then rotate it to the extrude is facing the viewer "up and down". Here are some shapes done only using the Extrude tool..


Attachment 132689

Because the Extrude tool doesn't "self-shadow" objects, you need to add trhem yourself, usually with Transparency in Multiply mode.

Here are other examples, and if there is an interest, I'll post the base profiles, and some of the finished pieces to goof around with.

Attachment 132690

A lot of the key to success is "seeing" in 3D, which is simpler than you'd think because already do this! Now, CREATE in 3D rather than just viewing it.

I hope there are no "tricks"or anything I've done here. It's just challenge after challenge as to how a shape in the real world can be expressed in the virtual world using shapes and the Extrude tool.


My Best,

Gary



.

Odd as it is, I am someone who creates 3D images with a totally 2D brain. Try to extrude that! :)

I tried and no joy.

Unless you can feel it, oG.

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