Cheetah3D 4.3 Beta 1

Martin

Martin

0
Cheetah3D 4.3 Beta 2

Hi,
since I had very few time recently my release plans for 4.3 are quite delayed so here is at least a beta of 4.3.

4.3 adds the often requested texture or lightmap baking functionality to Cheetah3D. Including a second set of UV coords. It also important to know that the UV Tag was deprecated. It will be still there in old scenes to maintain backward compatibility but you can't create a UV tag in 4.3 anymore. So please use the UV Mapper tool for the tasks you formally used the the UV Tag.

To bake a texture the first thing you should do is to add the new "Bake texture" toolbar item to the toolbar. The rest is almost self explaining.

1. Select the polygon object you want to bake a texture.
2. Click on the bake texture toolbar icon. Now a "Bake Textur" tag will be added to the object. Here you can set some baking parameters. Or you can UV coords for the texture baking.
3. Click a second time on the Bake texture toolbar icon. Now the texture will be baked.

Working with FBX it is important to know that the second UV set will be only exported if a Baking tag is assigned.

Code: 
-Added texture baking
-Added texture baking tag
-Added secondary UV set support to all UV tools
-Added export/import of secondary UV set to FBX loader
-Added weld vertices mode to optimize tool
-Added pos/scale/rot properties to UV Mapper tool
-Updated FBX SDK to (v2006.11_1)
-Deprecated UV Tag
-Maped "Save" to "Save As" for non .jas files
-Combine polygon selections when material drag & drop
-Fixed object browser drawing bug (names)
-Fixed material assignment bug
-Fixed .sia loading bug
-Fixed bug on beige G3 systems
-Fixed bug in ring cut tool
-Fixed bug in transform gadget
-Fixed bug on SpaceNavigator support
-Fixed crashing bug in irradiance cache
-Fixed FBX exort bug (object will be given unique names)
-Fixed various bugs in UV packing
-Fixed bug in edge rotate tool
-many other small things

Please be aware that this is beta software. So don't use it with important data.!!!

You can find the alpha at

http://cheetah3d.com/download/Cheetah3D4.3b2.zip

Please post your experiences with this beta in this forum thread.

Bye,
Martin
 
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Ah, my waiting has paid off. Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you very much for this great application.:D

Thank you,

Lincoln Green:cool:
 
Oh, excellent. Thanks much for the tool fixes, the Save As for non-.jas's (I know opinions varied on that, but I think that's a good way to handle it), and definitely the vertex welding -- already coming in handy!
 
OK, I've baked my first texture.

Now how to apply it to my mesh? I can save the baked texture from the render manager, then create a new material which uses the saved texture... am I on the right track here? or am I missing something?
 
have you got Unity?
Click to expand...
My goal is a real-time walk through a radiosity-baked model... if Unity is the best environment for this, then that's fine by me. But before doing a cake-walk, first I must bake my cake!

You can bake to UV1 and see the results in C3D.
Click to expand...
Podperson: I tried that, but still can't see anything in the editor window - only the unwrapped baked skin of the object in the render manager window... I just can't get the skin back onto the object.
 
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Hi ROI.
Sorry for stepping into the breach. Maybe you´re just missing a simple step here.
After baking the cake save that rendering.
Generate a new material and put the baked cake into the color channel.
Replace it with with your new texture and render again - here it is.
And if you want to see it at the UV editor just select the object, find its material and hit "Edit" in it´s properties.
Hope I don´t miss a thing here.:cool:

With kindest regards
Frank
 
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Ah this is a pure realtime-feature? No wonder I can't see the usefulness of it ;-)
Click to expand...
Not completely. Think of the rendering possibilities. If you could bake parts of your scene that were static, and then just animate characters on top of them (barring reflections and some shadow casting) you could vastly speed up rendering times on large animated scenes.
 
After baking the cake save that rendering.
Generate a new material and put the baked cake into the color channel.
Click to expand...
It works, hooray!

Replace it with with your former texture and render again - here it is.
Click to expand...
um, doesn't this just undo the previous step?

And if you want to see it at the UV editor just select the object, find its material and hit "Edit" in it´s properties.
Click to expand...
ahhhh, so that's how to load up a texture in the UV editing window - I could never work that out before!

Thank you so much, Frank.

I think I'm starting to get my head round baking. Next: learning the cake-walk...
 
Dranix said:
Ah this is a pure realtime-feature? No wonder I can't see the usefulness of it ;)
Click to expand...

Hi,
it is not a pure real time feature. It can be also used for non real time stuff. But I would guess that it is used at least in 90% of the cases for games. So it is mainly a real time stuff.:wink:

Bye,
Martin
 
I also posted this in the alpha thread(accidently) I think.

Importing an fbx with 2 uv sets seems to cause a crash...It would be better if cheetah ignored the second set?

Cheerrs
AC
 
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