ediris, if i understand your question right then the answer is yes.
Btw, A cool thing about SWAGE i did not know is that it does animated extrusions in realtime, i was quite shocked to see this happening on screen, its this kind of visual feedback EI users have wanting forever… as long as the poly-count is not too high then you can preview your stuff realtime.
Maybe a stupid question, but…wouldn´t a plugin for Illustrator that writes to this proprietary format do the trick? Or is this “Trestle” polyline file format to limited?
Absolutely possible. Here’s a quick breakdown of capabilities:
Scrim: Lofts polyline/wires to form surfaces.
Swage: Extrudes polyline/wires along a path.
Revolver: Lathes polyline/wires around a central axis.
Braider: Analyzes geometry and creates polyline/wires that follow surface topology.
Trestle: Draws 2D polylines/wires that feed Scrim, Swage, and Revolver along with other 3rd party plugins.
Free plugins include:
Path2line: Converts an object motion path into a polyline for use with Scrim, Swage, and Revolver.
Wiremaker: Analyzes geometry and creates polyline/wires based of edges or polygons.
Runline: Included with Swage to cut up polylines into various user defined lengths.
Superlines: Creates shader based "false"geometry on wires at render time.
Konkeptoine Geometry Plugins that work well with Paralumino:
Mrs. Bebel: Extrudes surfaces with custom profile bevels. (Not path extrude)
Encage: Smoothes crude/rough geometry with SubDivision surface protocols.
From what I saw in your example, you used Braider to analyze a model to create surface wires and then used them as a base path to extrude geometry along with Swage right? My guess is there might be overlapping areas of geometry that is causing the flickering.
Swage will extrude in realtime and it works pretty well…
Here a simple wire was exported by EIM I believe and used as the extrusion path for the profile to follow. Everything here was being done in realtime in the EI camera window.
The setup was swage>runline>braider- i’ve still not rendered it out but i get the feeling it will still happen, anyway still trying out a few things… maybe i should read the manual
Thank you Aziz. Yes, it’s all Swage and sooooo easy to do…
The Hilbert path was made in FormZ and exported as DXF (polylines).
It is really rewarding to play with these tools because of the instant feedback of your alterations. Originally it was supposed to be only one round extrusion but it was so simple to do, I made three… And I regret not having the star shape rotating as it moves…
Very powerful toys.
Right now EIM (and potentially Telsa) wires can be saved out as a FACT file that can be used as child entities for Revolver, Scrim, Swage, Runline and Superlines to work on. Unfortunately EIM wires can not be loaded directly into Trestle for CV point editing. This is another import capability I’d like to see after AI files are supported.
However right now the old EIM has a small bug in it in that exported EIM wires contain 64 CV points per segment. So in the simplest terms if you were to draw a straight line with just 2 points and export that wire out of EIM to Animator, the exported Fact model would possess 64 CV points along that line. That would produce a huge amount of geometry with any of our plugins. You can only imagine if you were to draw a more complicated shape in EIM…the exported wire would possess hundreds of CVs and the result would be a polygon nightmare in Animator.
Hopefully Tesla will allow for variable tesselation for exported wires. That will improve things dramatically for us. And if I can’t get the Igors to assist in creating v2 of Trestle, perhaps a tool can be added in Tesla to write out polylines in Trestle’s native point format. I don’t know yet.
Inspired by this thread I have taken yet another good look at the offerings at Zaxwerks.
I really do like the way the ProAnimator package works - namely the quality of the text/ai extrusions and also the animation presets. The big let down is the rendering. I can’t see myself going for this without options to render elsewhere. Sadly there seems to be no way to get the animation out of ProAnimator & into EIAS or other 3D application. If only ProAnimator exported the animation, could this not be done via BVH?
No the speed and simplicity of ProAnimator’s animation (presets) is appealing but not the rendering.
If animation paths could be exported then that would mean I could perhaps tweak animation in EIAS. Mostly I just want to render in EIAS - no way do I ever want to use Zaxwerks renderer, to my eyes it’s horrid and far too limited.
BB
edit: Getting 3D text/logos into EIAS is not a problem for me (I have good modeling tools, but I am not very good at motion graphics animation).
1.Ok so will it be ¨easier to develop¨ a Tesla loader inside Trestle, for CV edit and animation than the famous .ai importer?
I guess what i was looking for is a combination of ASwage and MrsBevel so it could do an extrusion based on a path or polyline and at the same time rounded caps.That could be amazing for version2 of SWAGE or whatever you guys want.
