3D modeling is effectively used to create photo realistic illustrations or visuals of product, creating a more effective web presentation.
Although there are several good 3D rendering software packages available, one of the best values we have seen for commercial web development is Rhino 3D.
Start with a sketch, drawing, physical model, or only an idea—Rhino provides the tools to accurately model your designs ready for rendering, animation, drafting, engineering, analysis, and manufacturing.
Rhino can create, edit, analyze, and translate NURBS curves, surfaces, and solids in Windows. There are no limits on complexity, degree, or size. Rhino also supports polygon meshes and point clouds.
Mountain Eagle Marketing designed a website for Client. The client's designer originally designed graphics in CorelDraw and Macromedia FreeHand and rendered using Rhino software. Mountain Eagle took the graphics and digitally remastered and optimized for the Internet. See (23K) sample below:
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Technical Note: When purchasing a 3D modeling software make sure that blends or vignettes do not automatically render all the way to white for highlights. Control must be maintained so that gif images can be exported with a transparent background without losing model definition when required. See example below:
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In the example above, you see the web page background colors showing through because the rendering blends went to white (#FFFFFF) instead of an almost white blue (#FCFDFE).). When this happens the brightest highlights wash through to the background diminishing the graphic's 3 dimensional qualities and the webmaster or developer has to make a judgment call whether to gif or use a white background. This is a common problem with some 3D rendering packages and/or a common error that many designers make. This oversight does not allow the web developer to take the rendered graphic and optimize as a gif with a transparent background so that the item will appear as a floating object without the web page background showing through.
Cardinal Rule -; A graphics designer should almost never use pure white (#FFFFFF) in a blend. Always choose a near white value of the darkest color being blended!
DEFFINITIONS:
NURBS — Abbreviation
for Non-;Uniform Rational B-;Spline. This is a mathematical representation
for smooth curves and surfaces.
Point Cloud — A set of digitized points defined by
x, y & z points usually produced by a 3D laser scanner or digitizer.
The points are commonly used to form a 3 dimensional surface model. See examples
taken from aranz.com below:
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| Laser scanned point cloud from a hand (27,000 points) | A closed RBF surface consisting of 2,600 terms |
| The images above and several more examples of point clouds and 3 dimensional interpolation from point data can be viewed at the aranz.com website listed in the links below. Their site is worth a visit for anyone interested in 3D imaging for industrial, biometic and other scientific applications. | |
Polygon Mesh -; A collection of polygonal shapes with data points for surface model construction. The University of Southern Queensland, Department of Mathematics & Computing (linked below) use the analogy of chicken wire preformed by a sculptor as a basis for an underlying structure to describe a polygon mesh.
OTHER PAGES OF INTEREST:
Graphics
Design -; Graphical Design discussion, Software, tips
and more
Optimizing Graphics & Graphics
Conversions -; Comparison between GIFs and JPEGs, best practices.
OTHER USEFUL WEBSITES:
Discreet -; 3ds MAX and many other products
3D Software Tutorials -; Tutorial Find has an extensivelisting of tutorials for the various 3D modeling software packages.
http://www.davidgould.com -; Good Resources for Graphics Modeling
http://aranz.com -;
Applied Research Associates NZ Ltd is ISO9001 registered to supply
research, design and development of software, electronic and hardware
products for the industrial, scientific and biomedical sectors. specializing
in new technology for 3D surface digitizing and fitting.
http://www.sci.usq.edu.au/courses/CSC3406/m06.html -;
Modeling Shapes with polygon meshes.
3D Studio Max -; The latest version of Discreet's award-;winning modeling, animation, and rendering solution used by the world's top 3D professional artists and designers to create eye-;catching visual effects, cutting-;edge games, and unique design visualizations.
