EON Raptor™ 5.5 Features

Introduction

EON Raptor™ (hereinafter Raptor) is a 3ds max plug-in (version 4 or later) that enables you to display and interact 3ds max content in real-time with intuitive controls. Simple interactive behaviors can also be authored rapidly without leaving 3ds max.

The completed application can then be published to a web page for viewing with a browser, exported to a standalone file for viewing with the free EON Viewer™ application or exported to EON Studio™ for further editing to create even more complex 3D applications. EON Studio is a complete visual authoring tool for creating 3D interactive applications, with support for high-end VR hardware and powerful user-extensible components.

With the use of Raptor, the 3ds max user can create interactive walkthroughs and design reviews within minutes, saving time and costs and offering a more flexible design tool due to its interactive nature.

Raptor provides the following features:

  • Real-time 3D visualization.
  • Seamless integration with 3ds max 4.0 or later.
  • Full-screen support.
  • Intuitive navigation and user interface.
  • Support for quick and easy distribution of content over the Internet.
  • Html templates for rapid Web integration.
  • Highly compressed file format with support for user-customizable geometry and texture compressions. 
  • All 3ds max contents can be exported, including animations, lights, cameras, parent-child relationships, pivot point, multi-materials, etc.
  • Interactions can be created to trigger animations by clicking on selected objects.
  • Export radiosity solutions either as lightmaps (texture baking) or vertex color data.

The complete User Guide and Reference Guide can be found here.

What is being exported

 
Element Comments
Geometry All geometrical objects that can convert themselves to triangle-based polygonal objects are exported.
... Polygon objects .
Vertex color .Alpha component is not exported in current version (2.0)
Nurbs objects .
Material Ambient color, Diffuse color, Specular color, Specular Level, Glossiness and Opacity setting are converted.
. Map channels
. Diffuse Only channel type of Bitmap is properly supported; for other types a rendering (256x256 pixels) of the map is made and used as texture. 
. Bump map The texture in this map channel is interpreted as a normal map, to be used to create real-time bump map effects. Note that a normal map, although similar, is not the same as the height field texture being used by 3ds max to create bump map effects. You can use the render-to-texture command in 3ds max 6 or other texture tools to convert the height field textures to normal maps.  

NOTE: a programmable graphics card such as GeforceFX 5200 or higher or ATI 9500 or higher is required to show the bump effects. If your deployment target machine does not have such a graphics card, you should not use/enable the bump map channel, otherwise the whole material will be rendered incorrectly.
. Self illumination The texture is interpreted as a dark map, i.e. the base layer (diffuse channel) will be modulated by this texture to form the final material color. These kinds of maps are commonly used to provide a static global illumination lighting to an environment. The render-to-texture command in 3ds max can be used to create these textures automatically.

NOTE:  a programmable graphics card such as GeforceFX 5200 or higher or ATI 9500 or higher is required to show this rendering effect. If your deployment target machine does not have such a graphics card, you should not use/enable this channel, otherwise the whole material will be rendered incorrectly. 
. Reflection If neither bump map nor self-illumination channel is defined, this map is interpreted as an environment reflection map, adding on top of the base layer (diffuse channel).

If either bump map or self-illumination channel is enabled, the texture in this channel is being used as a cube map, providing a more efficient and correct reflection. 

To create a cube map, you can use an advanced rendering tool such as the VRay rendering plugin, or you can render the 6 images manually and then stitch them together using the Texture Tool in the Microsoft DirectX 9.0 SDK.

NOTE:  a programmable graphics card such as GeforceFX 5200 or higher or ATI 9500 or higher is required to show this rendering effect. If your deployment target machine does not have such a graphics card, you should not use/enable this channel, otherwise the whole material will be rendered incorrectly. 
Texture

If Summed Area Filtering is chosen, the texture is mip-mapped in EON. If you want to use alpha-transparency in texture, PNG format must be used.

Tiling, Offset and other map transformation parameters on the Material Editor is not used. To control the tiling and other mapping parameters, apply a UVW Map modifier.

All bitmap formats readable by 3ds max are supported. However, all formats except PNG and JPEG are converted to PNG, as EON natively only supports PPM, PNG and JPEG.

Furthermore, images of size not divisible with power-of-2 are automatically scaled to nearest power-of-2 size and saved in PNG format. 

Animation If an object is animated, its position, orientation and scaling are sampled at each frame. 

New features in Raptor 5.5

Added support for 3ds max 8

Added a new control to set the texture format when creating a distribution file (EDZ).

The following texture formats can be chosen when creating a distribution file:

AUTO              (let Raptor select the most suitable format)

PNG                (8-bit alpha, suitable for interface images and other places where lossless compression is essential)

JPEG2000       (not recommended if the image contains alpha channel, best compression)

DDS DXT1       (no alpha or 1-bit alpha, best compression of all DDS file formats)

DDS DXT3       (4-bit explicit alpha, most suitable for textures with sharply contrasting translucent/opaque areas)

DDS DXT5       (4-bit interpolated alpha, most suitable for textures with soft gradients and where alpha areas vary less wildely)

Note: to set individual texture compression format for each texture, you have to export to EOZ file and set this up in EON Studio.

Texture compression is no longer previewed in the EON Raptor window

Due to long compression time if working with big textures, the preview of compressed textures in the EON Raptor window is now by default turned off. To see how the compression affects the texture appearance, you have to select the Preview Compression option on the Raptor Texture Compression panel.

Animation Sampling Rate is now configurable

In the previous version, the sampling rate is always locked to 1 sample per animation. It is now possible to set this to a custom value, to avoid excessive large amount of keyframes. Please check the Animation Sampling Rate controls for further information.

Generation of Mipmap levels for textures is now configurable

Generation of mipmap levels for all textures can now be turned on/off using the new control on the Raptor Texture Compression panel.

 
© 2006 EON Reality, Inc