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632 Chapter 20: Managing Scenes and Projects
of compression of the scene assets is set by three
controls: Geometry Quality , Texture Quality, and
Animation Quality. The controls have values
that range from 0.1 to 100.0, with higher values
giv ing less compression and better quality (a more
faithful representation of the original model).
A va lue of 100 means that the scene assets will
be represented at the best quality possible, but
w ith some degree of compression st ill present. It
does not represent the value at wh ich compression
does not occur. Also, the compression con trols
do not have a linear scale, so a setting of 20.0
doesn’t necessari ly mean that the quality level of
the resulting data is tw ice as good as that produced
w ith a setting of 10.0.
Geometry quality—Cont rols how much the scene
geometry data (such as vertex positions and
normals and texture coordinates) is compressed.
The default of 25.0 generally produces a good
compromise b etween data accuracy and space
savings.
Tex ture quality—Controls the compression of
textures (images) in the scene.
Animation quality Controls the compression of
animation data in the scene. Higher compression
levels (lower quality) tend to remove the finer
motions authored in the scene, especially
motion-capture data, while occasionally
introducing small noise artifacts.
Note: You might need to use larger values of the
Animation Sampling Interval control
(below)
along with greater values of this setting to
minimize the file space consumed by animation
while st i ll maintaining acceptable motions.
Texture Size Limits group
The Texture Size Limits setting lets you reduce
thesizeoftheW3Dfilebylimitingthesizeofthe
texture maps in the export.
The reduced size of the texture maps w ill usually
look fine on the model, because the model’s
UVW texture coordinates wil l have already taken
into account the non-square dimensions of the
image. Use the smaller settings if, after tuning the
compression settings and simplifying the scene
in3dsMax,theW3Dfileisstilltoolarge.Ifthe
scene contains no textures, or only small textures,
limiting the texture size will not help to reduce the
size of the W3D file.
No limits on texture size—Exports all texture maps
inthesceneatthefullresolutionoftheimageas
used in 3ds Max. For example, a 2048 X 4096-pixel
imagewillbewrittentotheW3Dfileatthese
dimensions (compressed, of course).
512 by 5 12 pixel s max i mum—Exports the texture
maps so that no image exceeds 512 X 512 pixels. A
2048 X 4096-pixel image will be sca led to a 512 X
512-pixel image; a 128 X 1024-pixel image wi ll b e
scaled to a 128 X 512-pixel image.
256 by 2 56 pixel s max i mum—Exports the texture
maps so that no image exceeds 256 X 256 pixels.
A 2048 X 4096-pixel image will be scaled to 256 X
256 pixels; a 128 X 1024-pixel image will be scaled
to 128 X 256 pixels.
Animation Options group
The Animation Options group contains the
controls to change how an animation is captured.
Sampling interval—This setting is used to capture
object animation once every specified number of
frames.
RangeThese Start and End controls indicate
which frames of the scene animations are to be
captured. By default, t hese values are set to capture
the entire animation interval specified in 3ds Max,
sampling all animations in the scene ever y frame.