How do I make a 3D-Object of this Xara-Shape?

[Burpee]

Hey Wolfgang, I opened your jpg in Bryce but had to take it into PSPXI for some fine tuning. I had to remove the black frame, make it a negative image, soften the edges then opened it in Bryce. I made the lattice thin by moving the height bars near to the top and very close to gether. This is what I get:

[Burpee]

I can zip and attach the Bryce6.1 file if you want to look at it and see what I did in the terrain editor. Just let me know.

Edit: We cross posted Wolfgang. I hope you get this message.

Editedit: Geezers, I haven't opened Bryce in 2 years and I'm surprised that I still remember how to get around. Was kind of fun. I used to be pretty good with this software and even though I own Vue6Infinite I think I still like Bryce better just for the sheer fun of playing with it....Vue is more like work.

[Wolfgang]

Burpee,
thanks a lot for your effort!

The enclosed image still shows a lot of jaggies, just like the version I made myself.
Bill's object on the other hand works perfectly and is absolutely clean. I had to do some work when I applied the texture, like offsetting it and so on ... don't know why but in the end it worked nicely.

I just got up, but later I will check if there is a setting to get a cleaner lattice like you mentioned ...

Wolfgang

[Soquili]

Hi Wolfgang,

I think the adjustments for the texture are probably due to the units I use in Cinema 4D. The object file is set for Meters.

I did not think to convert to the same units you used in your .xar file.

[Wolfgang]

Hi Bill,

that may be possible, but I managed to fix it.
No worries ... ;-)

Thanks!

Wolfgang

[Burpee]

Your jpg had these jaggies in PSPXI. They were very obvious in my program. I did not clean them up but used 'soften' to eliminate the harshness of the outline. With a better jpg you'd get a better end result in Bryce or perhaps making the terrain lattice smaller to begin with would help. A small scale jpg on a large lattice is going to show jaggies.

Of course, now I'm curious and will have to check for myself I'm going to make a clean shape in XX and see if it works better in Bryce.

[Burpee]

Well, that was an exercise in futility. The best results I got were with a png (but I don't think it would matter which extension is used) that had 'soften more' added to it 3 times.
The biggest problem is the flat pixels at the 4 segments. You can see them in the image. It didn't seem to matter which resolution I applied to the lattice as long as it was above 512. Plus you can see the seam where the lattice is symmetrical.

....I just exported the lattice as a 3ds and brought it back in and smoothed it. The lattice seam is gone but the original jaggies from the photo are still there. I've seen people do completely smooth lattice work but I don't have a clue how they do it...apparently

Top object is the 3ds.

[Wolfgang]

Today, I finally found the time to get back to Bryce and check for the terrain-issue.
Sadly, I did not find the magic "Jaggie-B-gone" - setting.

Even if I exported the shape with 4096 pixels width from Xara and used the same big texture-setting in Bryce, I still got the jaggies. And most of all ... rendering takes forever!

But thanks to Bill, I could use the .obj he supplied.

The enclosed image is by no means meant to be a perfect rendering or anything.
I just checked, that there are absolutely no jaggies that way. Works perfectly for me.

Still, I would very much like to have said "Shape to Object"-program to do such things myself.

@Bill: I downloaded and tried Truespace, but I basically can't get anything done with it. I found a lot of tutorials on the Caligari-site, maybe I will try them out.

Once again, thanks to everybody who helped. I can now create my Wallpaper quick and jaggie-free ;-)

Wolfgang

[emel]

You will always need a 3D program to do this kind of bridging.
I'm enclosing a obj file generated in MoI. The advantage of MoI is the clean meshes it produces, very superior to most of the app I know including C4D.
Just open it (import) it to Bryce and get the picture.

Cheers

Emanuel
www.homographicus.com