3ds export missing surface texture - RealWorld forums

v2010 trial. Make a cylinder NURBS or not, load a texture imgame and save. Now export to .3ds file and in preview texture is missing as indeed it is after the export.

Is this a bug or a failing of the .3ds file format???

It is a limitation, textures are ignored. The export to .3ds was made on request for a special scenario and is not a core feature of the application.

Is it going to stay a limitation??

I haven't thought about it. There are no immediate plans to implement it and it is not trivial to do it correctly in all cases. If there were a use case that demonstrates that texture export is more important than the competing features...

I see. Perhaps I can get round the problem.

The 3D text, can this be made to curve around the body of a cylinder? Any hints?

The extrusion of the 3D text can be controlled by a curve, but the front side of the 3D text is always in one line. You would probably have to add each letter and position and rotate it individually.

Thanks for the tip. If you do go for texture support in .3ds export perhaps you could define 2 or 3 shapes that support it, cube, sphere, cycinder and define the image in some way, size and format to simplify the workload. Just a thought.

I'll see how much would it be to have at least basic support for textures. One of the problems is delivering the files to the right place. The .u3d texture may come from a built-in library or be in a different image format than .3ds can work with.

Still on the texture export thread.. The u3d files that Icon editor makes; do you know of any other program that will open these files? Much of the software tried will open the exported 3ds files but not the native u3d files. Even tried Photoshop CS5 which cannot parse the files..

I do not think there is another application that can import .u3d files. The file format is not difficult, but basically almost the whole editor is needed to interpret the data stored there.

Thanks. The reason I'm so interested in the 3ds texture facility is for the 3D model library in Labcenter's Proteus VSM. The fact is Icon editor is a very capable 3D drawing package, its like a cut down version of Blender or StudioMax and as such is SOOO user friendy. For me, a texture facility would be a big plus estp Non-NURBS surfaces like flats for cylinders, basically electronic component shaped things. Model texture would allow a capacitor value, voltage and make to be included in the model, so easy to change too, just a new bitmap.

OK, I'll see what I can do about the export.

Excellent! Perhaps Labcenter would be interested in including Icon Editor as part of thier package, like a 3D modeling utility. Proteus does not include that many 3D models, magnetics are v.badly supported. They recommend using Blender to make user 3D models. Hmmmm hence my interest in Icon editor.....