3DVIA®

There are well over two dozen different 3D applications with a variety of tools and complexity in use by 3D artists around the world today. Our website, 3DVIA supports the majority of these programs through a few key file formats and texture formats.  In this series of articles we will discover the best ways to upload and show off your work, and discuss individual tips and best practices for 3DVIA Shape, DCC and CAD users.  In this first blog, we will cover the general tips that work for any user.

Vocabulary:
DCC- Digital Content Creation- A term describing 3D animation tools like Maya and 3D Max.
CAD- Computer Aided Design- drafting, engineering and architecture tools like CATIA.

General Tips
I’ve spoken before about the different requirements of Real Time Rending vs. Pre-rendering in this post “Not All 3D is created Equal” and along those lines you can see how a more complex model would take up more resources when being displayed over an online medium in Real Time.  The following are a few ways you can help keep your model file size down:

Model Construction
There are a few techniques that I have covered in this previous post “Staying on your Polygon Diet” that will help greatly with file size and complexity. 

Textures
- The majority of a model’s file size may come from your textures. Using a compressed format like JPG or PNG is the key.

- Keep your texture sizes at or below 1024 x 1024 pixels. The size and resolution of a texture greatly affect the file size of the texture.  3DVIA.com automatically reduces in size and quality any texture greater than 1024 x 1024 during the upload process.

- If you are using Photoshop, a good tip is to use the “Save for Web & Devices..” save option and use 60% quality.  This will reduce the file size greatly, while maintaining quality.

- When using repeatable textures, crop the texture down to a single iteration. all 3D programs tile textures across an unlimited spectrum, so you only need the smallest building block for a repeatable pattern.

General Tricks
There are a few less well known tricks that will allow you to get the most out of 3DVIA. Most of these involve the use of 3DVIA Shape Remix and the 3DVIA Player.

3DVIA Shape Remix- This is one of those unique things that put 3DVIA above the rest. We’ve talked about Remix and about the requirements to allow your models to be used in a Remix before but the main ones are:      
                                   -File size after upload to 3dvia.com is less than 2mb
                                   -Model is public.

NOTE: If you think you’ve done everything right to allow the model to be usable in shape but are still getting the message in the model information window “Not Usable in Shape(?)” click on the question mark for more information on the reason its not usable.

Lets say your model is too big and you can’t or don’t have time to change the textures.  What you can do is upload the model in smaller parts, and then “assemble it” online with 3DVIA Shape Remix!

3DVIA Player- Very few people know that the player has some powerful built-in capabilities, and we’ve made all these tools available from the radial menu:

•  Adding a shader- You can can cycle through a selection of shader included in the 3dvia player by pressing and holding the middle mouse button and moving the mouse to the Shader button.  Repeated use of the button will cycle through all these shaders:                                  
                                    -Cartoon Shader
                                    -Sparkling Shader
                                    -Fresnel Environment Shader
                                    -Double Sided directional Shader

Changing the models position-  Sometimes your model displays at a weird angle or position.  You can fix this!  When you middle mouse click, you not only open the radial menu but you also set a marker for were you want the camera to focus on and rotate around.  Using this same marker, you can select a point on the model indicating this is the direction you want to face downwards and select reposition model from the radial menu.  The player will automatically reorient the model using your market as its new “ground level”

Saving your Settings-  All of this would be for naught if you couldn’t share it with your friends.  As long as you are logged and you own the model you can save the shader and position settings by selecting “Save the current settings” from the radial menu.

NOTE: As of this moment the ability to update / change the thumbnail is not possible, but it is something we are all looking forward too, as soon as I have an update I’ll let you guys know.

Next up we will look at Tips & Tricks for Shape, DCC and CAD Applications, so stay tuned!

-Juan