Electric Rain Swift3D LW 2
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On the low end, Cartoon Single Color Fill gives you a very flat representation of your image, but tends to render the most compact vector files. On the flip side, Mesh Gradient Shading attempts to recreate as many nuances as possible in your image through very liberal use of gradients, and in some cases can be indistinguishable from a raster-based render format. The downside is that each frame has the tendency to be somewhat large by vector standards, not to mention that it usually adds a fair amount of time to render over the simpler shading options. Regardless of the fill type you use, you can also add options such as shadows, specular highlights, and reflections to make your image a little more realistic, but of course the nuttier you choose to get can add to the overall file size and render time.
For those of you who are more into the cartoon aspect of a tool like Swift3D LW 2, you can choose to add edges to your objects. Of course, you can also get some pretty cool wireframe effects going on by just rendering edges and leaving out fills altogether. There really isn't much to say here other than that -- the edge part of the tool is pretty self-explanatory from the earlier screenshot. So I might as well lump in the miscellaneous stuff that I showed back in figure 6, because there's an option there that combines edges and fills, making it possible to shave a little bit of file size off of your renders if you need to (or, conversely, lets you keep edges and fills separate so you can manipulate each in Flash). The lines/curves slider and level of detail options are there pretty much to let you do some additional tweaking should file size really become an issue, as these controls can manipulate the final rendered geometry enough to influence how the various color fills and gradients are rendered.[an error occurred while processing this directive]Now that we've covered how you control the way your stuff looks, let's get to the various types of file formats supported by Swift3D LW 2. You have to give Electric Rain credit here, as they have not skimped at all on format choices (fig. 8).
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| Figure 8: There are options aplenty when choosing an output file type. |
You've got SWF, which I assume you expected. You've also got sequential EPS, which is key for users that are using certain non-Macromedia Flash tools (*cough* LiveMotion *cough*) that do not support SWF import. You've also got sequential EPS's cousin, sequential AI, and both are useful in single-frame renders that can be brought into drawing programs like Freehand or Illustrator, respectively. You've got SVG, and kudos on the somewhat early adoption and support of this developing standard. You've got USAnimation, for exporting files to be used directly with the Toon Boom product. You've even got standard raster output to SWF format, which bypasses the Ravix renderer altogether (it's accessed instead through LightWave's standard Render Option panel) and lets you save out your raster image sequences directly to a SWF file (fig. 9).
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| Figure 9: You can even render raster sequences directly to SWF from LightWave's regular Render Options panel. |
If you've been religiously following along with me using the list shown in figure 8, you are doubtless cursing my name for my omission of the Swift3D Flash Importer, or SWFT, output option. My humblest apologies for eschewing the order shown in that image, but I felt that the SWFT format (which, incidentally, is new to Swift3D LW 2) deserved its very own shout out, since it's pretty much the Mack Daddy here. Swift3D LW 2 gives you a custom importer that looks for a Flash MX installation and then automatically stashes the SWFT format import plug-in into your Flash MX directory. Once it's there, SWFT files appear to Flash MX as just another importable file type, meaning that you can seamlessly use Ravix-rendered files directly in the Flash authoring environment (fig. 10).
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| Figure 10: The result of bringing a SWFT file into Flash MX. Notice how the importer automatically creates layers based on static and moving objects in the Timeline. |
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