I wish enliven would allow the use of larger light maps. A 512x512 limit would be fine to get a good reflection or maybe allowing a flash file to be used as a light map since it's vector would be nice. I would to love to see a better texture dither the settings seem to take you from dots to grainy it's hard to get a good result. Thanks for allowing my input.

I'm guessing from the lack of interest in my thread that larger lightmaps will not be a option in the new version of enliven

Hi Marvin,

We review all the posts in the wish list and report-a-bug forums though we may not always respond. We have entered the larger lightmaps as an enhancement. Though this may not be directly supported in the next version of Enliven, we are looking to make the next version of VMP support it. For now, one way we found you can get around this limitation is to place your hi-res jpg's in swf's and use the swf's as lightmaps.

Regards

I tried that before but got weird blue lines but maybe that was from using the trace bitmap feature on the image I'll try just using a larger image in a swf. Thanks for the reply and by lack of interest I meant other enliven users weren't interested not that you (Admins) weren't interested. I'll try using the larger image in a swf next week since I'm updating some stuff at work.

I've found that using flash files as light maps look very good but it looks like everytime I place a .swf as a lightmap for a different object a new animation is generated in the animation room. This gets really ugly because I have 25 objects that need to change color 10 together. So when I go to the publish room enliven takes up 1.5gb of ram to create preview files and since I have to adjust the qaulity settings this goes up to 1.8gb of ram. And if I do more work at that point and try to go to the publish room enliven crashes. In short flash files are a good work around if you don't need to change colors. But if you have a complex scene it looks like this is not a work around for the size limitation.

Hi Marvin,

Exactly how large are the dimensions of your swfs?

I'm not sure what lightmaps have to do with changing color on the obects. Are you swapping different color lightmaps to alter the color on the objects? If so, a better solution would be to keep the lightmap the same (neutral grey tones) and change the diffuse color on the objects instead. I'll wait to say more until I hear what you're trying to do.

Regards

Hi Marvin,

Here is an Enliven project with 3 swf lightmaps at around 1024x1024 each:

http://slaw.viewpoint.com/users/cbrown/large_swf_lightmaps.zip

The performance is still good. But I would imagine with 50 or so of them, you're going to have problems. How many do you have exactly and how large are they?

The lightmap size is 512x512 and yes i use the light map to change color. I use lightmaps to change color because it's easier to make animation to change the lightmap one object (is you use a light map of 256 or below enliven won't make instances of it. And a one timeline animation will change every object the lightmap is on). Also it's better to have 10 lightmaps them 10 different texture for 20 different objects. Also I'm finding I'm having publishing errors where I've places flash lightmaps on copied objects. I've thought about placing a 512x512 image in a flash file thats 256x256 but I haven't had a chance to test that out because I'm racing to make up for the 5 days I spent making my project with the larger flash lightmaps.

I have around 21 objects and this only goes up over time.

Ok. so I'm assuming changing the diffuse color on the objects doesn't work because you have diffuse textures on the objects, not diffuse colors. In this case, I would have suggested you use Texture Compositor instead of what you're doing, but I'm assuming it's too late? Texture Compositor was designed for the exact purpose of what you are doing -- you don't want to change the textures on the objects, you want to change the colors of the textures -- and lightmaps as you are finding out are not a good solution.

Yes the ideal solution would be to alter the color of the texture. It would be too late for the project I just finish but I have 2 more projects to update and it would be good to know about for the future. Is this in Enliven now?

It's not in Enliven, but it's built into VMP 3.4. So you would have to insert the texture compositor tags by hand. You can read all about texture compositor in the VMP 3.4 release notes .

Since what you are doing is so database heavy, I'm assuming you probably get the basic structure of your scenes set up in Enliven, export the code, and then work in the code. How I work is I use Enliven to get the main structure set up with interactions, animations, composition, and so forth and once I hit something not supported in Enliven yet, such as texture compositor, I work in the code from there on out. Then, I save a copy of my completed mtx so that if I have to export out of Enlive again it will not write over my changes. Then I just use Araxis Merge to merge my template code into the latest exported Enliven mtx. It actually works very nicely. I know I shared this method of working with Bruce (aka bhnh) and he loves it!

Regards

Marvin,

I attached a really simple example texture compositor scene to help you get started. The example is the one given in the release notes, except with all the documentation mistakes cleaned up. There is a word doc that discribes the mistakes in the documentation.

Regards

texture_compositor_practice.zip (38 KB, 5 downloads)

I'll have to give this a try, I guess running from coding is pointless. Thanks for the advice, I plan on using viewpoint a lot more in the future so I should get to know it.