—MODELING FOR ZAP

 

3Space export for Amapi 3D 5.15A

This document describes the new 3Space export for Amapi 3D 5.15A

Installation:
You must first install Amapi 3D 5.15A .

Then you may check that the 3Space plug-in is correctly installed, open Amapi 3D, create a simple geometry, then click on file->export. The sub-menu should include a 3Space entry. Select this entry and give a name to the exported file. This name must have a .z3d suffix. For instance: sample.z3d. The exporter will then create two files: sample.z3d containing the geometry written in ZAP format and sample.html containing the XML tag and the 3Space player object. To view the result in Internet Explorer you need to:

  • Install the 3SpacePlayer extension into Internet explorer. See the 3SpacePlayer help file in the 3SpacePlayer directory.
  • Copy the Schemas.xml file provided with the 3Space player into the directory where you created the sample.xxx files.
  • Once this is done, just open the sample.html file and you will see your object inside the 3Space player.

 

Description of the 3Space export:

The Amapi 3Space export saves the current visible polygonal geometries with some of their rendering attributes. It also keeps lights and cameras and computes the limit of the scene. Although the camera is located exactly at the same position, the default field of view is different in the 3Space Player than in Amapi 3D, resulting in object appearing farther from the viewer than in Amapi 3D. The limits of the scene are set to the bounding box of the whole scene scaled up by 10%.

Hidden objects are not saved. Curves and lines are ignored.
Objects are saved with their current names. It is important to notice that names should include only alphabetic characters. The XML parser may reject other characters. This limitation is due to XML and not to Amapi3D nor to the 3Space Player. Using consistent names for objects make editing the XML document much easier.

Groups are saved as a single entity. This is a convenient way to build complex assemblies.
The geometry is stored in a single ZAP file and each group or shape is identified in this file by its name.
The XML tag containing the scene description of the exported geometry contains only fixed solids, camera and lights. It does not produce any 3Space animation. They must be done by editing this file by hand. For instance, by replacing the fixed attribute by 0 (not fixed) and adding a GravityForce element, the solids will fall down and bounce on the limits of the world.
See the 3Space Description Language document to learn more about the possible features of this language.

 

How to create very small 3D contents

In order to export compact geometry (which will be encoded into the ZAP file), we strongly suggest to :

  • Use NURBS surfaces as much as possible
  • Create polyhedral geometry with the minimal number of polygons and then use the smoothing tool to increase the density of the meshes and enhance their resolution.
  • The current version of the ZAP export only supports dynamic recording of the Bezier smoothing method (the first one in the smooting tool). It means that if you create a polyhedral model smoothed with the Bezier method, the output file will contain only the initial polyhedral geometry.
  • Next versions of the ZAP format will encode much more efficiently the other smoothing methods as well as all models created using the Dynamic Geometry

 

 

 
 

 

Be aware that the unit of the 3Space world is the meter. So we suggest you to work using the meter (or centimeter) unit in Amapi (use the Preferences >> Units settings menu).

Furthermore, the following rendering attributes are not exported:
- falloff
- filter
- reflection
- refraction
- 3D textures
- multi layer textures
- texture operations except mix and replace
- texture operand except color
- texture mapping type except sphere, plan cylinder
- texture balance

Some attributes may produce slightly different visual effects in Amapi and in 3Space Player. This is due to the limitations of the OpenGL rendering engine included into 3Space.