Texture Quality

[jaggedsoft]

Hi guys, I love Away3D. I plan to contribute in the future and
wouldn't mind donating in order to help promote the open source
movement.

I have an issue right now with every 3D engine except for Infinity3D
and Alternativa3D.
Texture quality.
Pixelation.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to overcome this? Or what I'm doing
wrong? I will be in your debt.

As an example, here is a swf using one of our models with Infinity3D.
http://gamegetter.com/flex/test/Load3DS.swf (hold W to zoom in and use
the mouse to navigate)

And here is a test of Away3D Lite.
http://gamegetter.com/flex/test/A3DL_Demo1.swf

Same 3DS is loaded, same 512x512 texture.

Now I know Infinity3D and Alternativa3D's engines use anti-aliasing
when you stop moving.. but I have no idea where I would add this in
Away3D. If someone can give me some direction, and I can make it
efficient enough, I'll submit it to the developers.

I want to use A3DLite really bad, and I'm looking forward to the
upcoming drawTriangles optimization. This texture quality deal is the
only hurdle right now.

[jaggedsoft]

I should post a correction - the first link was done with
Alternativa3D.
This is the one that was done with Infinity3D. (256x256 roof texture)
http://gamegetter.com/flex/test/i3d_loadobj.swf

[katopz]

it's weird if you say same texture, 

in lite texture is render in native flash10 btw, which mean we can't change it from outside or code

i did notice some diff between native and old method too but not much

look like i need to do some comparison and get back to you again

thx for report

2009/9/30 jaggedsoft <jagge...@gmail.com>

--
katopz
http://www.sleepydesign.com

[jaggedsoft]

The texture quality is the same in the lite version and the full
version for me.
I noticed there's a smoothing option in the regular version.. I'll
play around with that later.

[Rob Bateman]

setting smooth = true on materials should give you the same look as both infinity3d and alternativa engines. we just hav eit turned off by default because it can impact performance, as anitaliasing on teh movieclip has to be activated

the smooth property should be present in away3dlite as well

cheers

Rob

--
Rob Bateman
Flash Development & Consultancy

rob.b...@gmail.com
www.infiniteturtles.co.uk
www.away3d.com

[jaggedsoft]

Awesome, thanks Rob, I changed Away3D Lite's BitmapMaterial
_graphicsBitmapFill.smooth = true by default, and it looks superb.
Didn't even change my FPS, it is still 19-40.
Now the only thing Away3D is missing appears to be not rendering if
nothing has changed. This seems to be one of the major reasons why the
other engines get better performance. If no translations/rotations are
done, no need to re-render.

Once Away3D Lite does this and drawTriangles gets a list of every
triangle to draw at once, I am sure it will open a lot of doors for
RIA's and game development!

[jaggedsoft]

I noticed with A3DL .. when I stop calling view.render, it is still
taking about 100ms per frame. This appears to be due to how the
children are set up. If I am not mistaken, the other engines seem to
render to a bitmap any time you call render, and if nothing changes,
it's just drawing a bitmap which flash can do thousands of times per
second.

[tain]

Hi
I dont know about A3DL but A3D has straight to bitmap rendering and
model caching.

Rob made an example with something like 100000 polygons and it worked
great.
(cant find the link, web page seems to be down)

Tain

[Rob Bateman]

Hey jaggedsoft

Away3d Lite is unlikely to get triangle caching any time soon, because it adds a lot of weight to the code and is not in the spirit that Lite was intended - ie. a 'Lite' version

if you want to increase your framerate when you are aren't rendering, why not try setting cacheAsBitmap to true on the view? that should do the trick, but only if you arent' calling view.render();

Rob

[jaggedsoft]

Rob,
Thanks for all of your help. It is much appreciated.
I originally used Away3DL because of its raw speed. But I understand
what you mean about keeping it portable. I went ahead and moved back
to standard Away3D and am very happy with the results with only a few
modifications to how I'm rendering the scene.
What is the current state of hardware acceleration in A3D?
I understand A3D has triangle caching functionality, does this apply
to hardware acceleration?
Thanks!

[Rob Bateman]

Hey Jaggedsoft

hardware acceleration is not something possible on anything but a very limited basis in the Flash Player atm. we'd love to see some in the future, so if you feel strongly about it, be sure to let adobe know!

Rob