Wishlist; Import and Manipulate 3D models

[remi]

I can't see, that Xara would be willing to reconsider principal decisions in their code/datastructure.
To be fair: It's cost intensive to change the internal datastructure.
Therefore I wouldn't set hope in this nested layer thing.

Remi

[BONES]

I'm afraid that, even as a "Pro", I don't get the whole layers thing in a vector package. I put everything on one layer 99% of the time. If I want to be able to isolate a number of objects, I group them. If you want to equate it to a pixel-pusher, an object in Xara is the equivalent of a layer. In fact Corel call them Objects in Photopaint, and treat them as such, which is why I prefer it to Photoshop.
Even in compositing and motion graphics, which is what I do for a living, I studiously avoid layers unless they are absolutely necessary, mostly due to the extent to which layering slows down renders. IMHO, layers just over-complicate the process in Xara and the palette takes up space. Sure, there are times when you need them but I see no reason at all to have to use nested layers.

However, there are a lot of illustrative work which needs to incorporate structures into existing settings. You can buy a 3D package or use SketchUp free, but it can be tricky to use/learn and there are plenty of other professionals who can create the 3D models. Adobe's "tool/plugin" (Corel Designer Pro has one too or least they did 3 or 4 years ago) enables illustrators with 2d apps and 2d experience a "quick" means to integrate elements of a 3D model into the 2D world for a final "collage".

I use the method of importing transparent PNGs from a 3d app into Xara, but inevitably I have to go back and forth 2 or 3 times to resize/rescale and realign things and that is time consuming. And then if something changes before completion ....

None of that will change in the example above because you will still have to match the lighting in 3D with the background scene and you're not going to be able to do that first time out unless you put 3D lighting controls into Xara as well, or support for full-float HDRI colour correction. Which was my point - to be of any real value, it needs to be quite sophisticated and I don't see the point in devoting resources to it, just to do a half-arse job.

The point of this suggestive hinges on: 1) a plugin (if you don't want to load it, you don't have to) 2) the plugin "works" well 3) the belief that the graphic apps as we know them are changing due software and hardware innovations, thus, greater integration is possible so why not take advantage of it?

Plugins don't make themselves, resources have to be diverted from other areas to create them. For the effort involved, I don't see the value in something like this.

[handrawn]

Just one example - if I want say a drawing of a character in 20 or 30 different poses then in xara I just have one drawing - different positions of arms say in different layers - so so easy to switch - no messing trying to find objects to hide/show in the same layer. Easy to get the jointing right.

Couldn't do that cleanly with object grouping alone in a single layer

Grouped/nested layers would take this a stage further


Don't do 3D though, so maybe that's different somehow...

[Ross Macintosh]

I don't think Xara needs to become 3d enabled to the point that you can import and orbit 3d models. I do think Xara should play better with 3d applications and 'get with it' in understanding that there really are people who could use better support for 3d imports.

To me its all about getting the 3d geometries created in the 3d program into Xara for further manipulation of the various shapes and edges. I attach an example made in Xara X a few years ago. The shapes were imported from SketchUp and then used to fashion a vector illustration. The importation workflow is the part Xara could improve. As you can probably imagine from the example a 3d program is the easy way to create certain kinds of geometries. Drawing such shapes from scratch in Xara is of course possible but why would you want to struggle with getting it drawn right when an import can get you the shapes to work with easily. Importation of complex geometries as shapes an edges is a tremendous time-saver.

Many users of 3d programs use photoshop for post processing of their renders. After you've waited three hours for a render to generate sometimes a tweak of the image in 'postprocessing' can enhance it without needing to spend trial & error attempts to fix it by tweaking settings an re-rendering - where each re-render can take hours. So photoshop is a part of many 3d renderer's workflow. Xara has the potential to be even better at the postprocessing than photoshop but is hampered by the difficulties in getting the geometries into Xara. An example of how this might work is as follows: Imagine in a 3d program you modelled and rendered a scene from Blade Runner. It has thousands of windows showing in the scene. After the days of modelling the photorealistic render just took 7 hours to generate. Looking at it you figure it would look better if all those windows were reflecting a nuclear sunset. Editing it in photoshop would be a lot of work to do it right, so you decide to use Xara. In model you turn off everything but the windows and then using the same camera position as the render, you export the window geometries. You import them into Xara. It comes in as thousands of shapes. You select them and use Xara's 'join shapes' function. You then import the render image and put it behind. You align the window overlay's position so it matches the render and all the windows are masked by the vector shapes. Now you simply give the joined shapes a sunset bitmap fill, make the edges invisible and apply transparency. Presto now it appears all the windows are reflecting the sunset sky. You smile knowing this was far easier than had you attempted the same result in photoshop. Your easy result depended on Xara's ability to import 3d data.

In my sunset example this workflow is somewhat possible now depending on your 3d program. Xara could improve it by supporting 3d formats.

Regards, Ross

[pauland]

Ross, your blade runner example is rather flawed. In practice the Blade Runner scene would be rendered in several different passes - buildings, streets, people, vehicles, etc so that when you take the renders and combine them in a compositor you have complete control of the scene without having to re-render it in it's entirety. In your example, the windows could easily be rendered separately and photoshop could easily add a sunset to them since they are isolated from anything else.

Professional 3D people don't render complex scenes in one go.

Paul

[Ross Macintosh]

I wasn't thinking of a big production studio but more the kinds of modellers out there (thousands & thousands of them) using vray, Fry, Indigo, Kerkythea, and many other rendering systems. Most people using rendering engines aren't doing it the way you suggest Paul.

Fundamental to my thinking is this: Xara workes with vector shapes and lines. Many other programs create vector lines and shapes. I think it makes sense that Xara should work in the direction of making it easier to bring those lines and shapes into Xara.

For years Xara users have been asking for dxf importer to bring in lines from CAD programs. In theory it would seem to be about as easy an importer as possible but Xara have never given us a very practical way to import cad linework.

Regards, Ross

[pauland]

I wasn't thinking of a big production studio but more the kinds of modellers out there (thousands & thousands of them) using vray, Fry, Indigo, Kerkythea, and many other rendering systems. Most people using rendering engines aren't doing it the way you suggest Paul.

LOL, most people aren't doing "Blade Runner" on their computers either.. ;-)

Seriously though, a lot of one man bands do do separate passes for their renders, just as there are many that do not.

We'll agree to differ, I think.

Paul

[Ross Macintosh]

Certainly not 'Blade Runner' - the movie but many do create fantasy images akin to stills from movies like Blade Runner or Star Wars. While Xara might never find itself in the workflow of big CG animation studios it could be a great tool to thousands of renderers.

[BONES]

Just one example - if I want say a drawing of a character in 20 or 30 different poses then in xara I just have one drawing - different positions of arms say in different layers - so so easy to switch - no messing trying to find objects to hide/show in the same layer. Easy to get the jointing right.
Couldn't do that cleanly with object grouping alone in a single layer
Grouped/nested layers would take this a stage further

Now that we have multiple pages, I would just do one pose, duplicate the page, do the next and so on. A lot less faffing about hiding and unhiding layers.

To me its all about getting the 3d geometries created in the 3d program into Xara for further manipulation of the various shapes and edges. I attach an example made in Xara X a few years ago.

How long did that take you? In 3DS Max, I could knock that out in less than 10 minutes, including render time. Again I will emphasise that it is about horses for courses and doing 3D things in a 3D application is the way to go.

Many users of 3d programs use photoshop for post processing of their renders.

Only lazy and/or dull ones. I can do any post-processing inside 3DS Max in real-time. Of course, for any sophisticated post-processing I would choose something with proper colour-correction, not Photoshop.

After you've waited three hours for a render to generate sometimes a tweak of the image in 'postprocessing' can enhance it without needing to spend trial & error attempts to fix it by tweaking settings an re-rendering - where each re-render can take hours.

Maybe five years ago but not these days. The longest, most sophisticated renders I've done recently - an animation showing a Mars Explorer orbiting above the Red Planet in HD [1920x1080] for an ABC [government boradcaster] science program, took less than a minute per frame on my dual-core laptop.

So photoshop is a part of many 3d renderer's workflow.

Not in my experience and certainly not at 8-bits-per-pixel.

Xara has the potential to be even better at the postprocessing than photoshop but is hampered by the difficulties in getting the geometries into Xara.

Not without half-float or full-float colour space, which will slow down it's lightning-quick performance considerably, I'd imagine.

An example of how this might work is as follows: Imagine in a 3d program you modelled and rendered a scene from Blade Runner. It has thousands of windows showing in the scene. After the days of modelling the photorealistic render just took 7 hours to generate. Looking at it you figure it would look better if all those windows were reflecting a nuclear sunset. Editing it in photoshop would be a lot of work to do it right, so you decide to use Xara.

If you knew what you were doing, you would create the model with multiple Object and/or Material IDs and render to a multi-channel format like RLA, RPF or OpenEXR. You could then open it up in Photoshop or PhotoPaint or AfterFX or Combustion and be able to immediately isolate those windows and place any kind of reflection in them. Using these multi-channel formats with multi-pass renders, you would have far more control that you could ever hope for in Xara - more transfer modes, better control of lighting, etc.

What you're proposing is incredibly simplistic and would not be taken seriously by any 3D professional. The best way to get Xara into a 3D artist's toolset is as a means of creating texture maps. With Photoshop plug-in support, Xara is an incredibly flexible platform for this kind of work, which involves a lot of to-and-fro to line things up without any stretching or distortion.

I wasn't thinking of a big production studio but more the kinds of modellers out there (thousands & thousands of them) using vray, Fry, Indigo, Kerkythea, and many other rendering systems. Most people using rendering engines aren't doing it the way you suggest Paul.

Most of these renderers are not stand-alone, they are plug-ins for expensive 3D packages.

Fundamental to my thinking is this: Xara workes with vector shapes and lines. Many other programs create vector lines and shapes. I think it makes sense that Xara should work in the direction of making it easier to bring those lines and shapes into Xara.

I don't mean to pick on you, Ross, but the fundamental flaw here is that 3D applications work in three axes, with perspective and cameras. That is way, way harder than two axes in an orthographic space, right off the bat. Then there is the seemingly endless list of other things you can do in 3D that you cannot do in Xara. Even serious compositing applications like AfterFX and Combustion do not work with true 3D space, they simply allow you to position 2D planes within a restricted 3D space. We call them 2.5D applications. The cheapest full 3D compositor I can think of is Autodesk Toxik, which is the same price as 3DS Max [US$3500].

I love Xara and I use it more than any other application, in any discipline, every day. I work in broadcast TV and visual effects, using 3DS Max, Combustion and Toxik. I can tell you now that it is highly unlikely that it would be possible to add any kind of meaningful 3D import into Xara that would see me using it for anything. I'd much rather see proper, keyframe-based animation ability added - it would be much easier and infinitely more usable. In fact, it could almost make Combustion redundant, which I use for Flash animations as well as broadcast graphics, if it was done well. That said, its not something I ever expect to see.

[handrawn]

Now that we have multiple pages, I would just do one pose, duplicate the page, do the next and so on. A lot less faffing about hiding and unhiding layers.

And how exactly do you 'onionskin' multiple pages in xara? Not much use to me for setting up complex motion sequences if I can't do that.

I am sure we work differently - and this is not a problem, just the way of the world.