Heritage VR

Week 9

This week had our prototype presentation. The actual presentation didn’t actually go that badly, we did, however run into some major problems in the days leading up to it.

The first major problem that we ran into was when we when we first tried importing our models from cinema 4D into Quest3D. Apparently Quest is able to import a number of different 3D file formats including 3DS, LWO, DXF (strangely it does not import OBJ files) and many more, however we discovered that this is not the case. After many attempts at trying to import our models into Quest as a 3DS file, without success. After looking at some forums we realised that we needed to use quest’s native file format (.X). Unfortunately, even though there is a .X exporter available for Cinema 4D, every time we tried exporting from cinema 4D, the program would continually crash. Finally we discovered that the only way to effectively export from Cinema 4D to Quest3D was to export as an OBJ and then import that into 3D Studio Max (3DS files don’t seem to export properly from C4D either). We then exported the model again from 3D Studio Max as a .X into Quest.

The second big problem that we ran into was that during the process of exporting from Cinema 4D into 3D Studio Max, many of the normals were flipped in random places. This caused great time consuming problems as we were exporting large scenes at a time and we had to manually search through the whole scene to find these flipped normals and manually flip them ourselves. To start with we did this in 3D Studio Max, but later we discovered that you could actually do this in Quest itself, and this made it a lot easier.

Our final problem occurred Monday morning just before the presentation, when we opened up the project after working on it all weekend, only to discover that during the save process the night before, that the file had corrupted, and many of the models were missing from the scene. Luckily we still had an older version of it saved, and we were able to make some modifications quickly to that and show that for the presentation, although it was still not quite as good as the one we had intended to show. This was unfortunate, but we still felt the presentation went alright.

Screenshot of original prototype before it was corrupted

posted by Tim Davidson @ 8:27 pm