2008

NOTE Large animations can greatly lengthen the time it takes to see the start
of a Shockwave 3D animation, because they must fully download before any
of the scene can becomes visible.
■ Nodes or scenegraph hierarchy data (only in the initial load segment)
■ Unknown includes, for example, streaming priorities, names, and block
sizes.
File Organization Graphic display of the size of the entire file and its initial
load segment (ILS) portion. The ILS, in orange, consists of all the data that
must be loaded before Shockwave will display the scene (scenegraph data,
animations, shaders, and any textures or geometry with a streaming priority
of zero). The rest of the file, in light blue, represents all of the streamable data
with a non-zero streaming priority. This data will continue to load and fill
out the detail of the scene as the download proceeds.
Runtime Texture Information Approximate texture memory that will be
required at run time to display the textures in the scene. Scenes requiring
more than a few megabytes of texture memory will require accelerated graphics
cards to display textures at their full resolution.
Stereolithography (STL) Files
Importing STL Files
File menu > Import > StereoLitho (*.STL)
An STL file saves object data in a format used for stereolithography. STL files
have a filename extension of .stl. There is an ASCII STL format as well as a
binary STL format. You can choose which to create when you export a 3ds
Max scene.
STL files are generally used for purposes of rapid prototyping. A variety of
methods use the STL format to construct prototypes. For example, many STL
machines use a liquid polymer and harden it in small slices, creating a solid
plastic model. Other STL machines use metal powder to create a model in
steel. Still other machines use a special wax.
You can import and export STL files. See
Exporting to STL on page 7076 .
Stereolithography (STL) Files | 7073