Eyeon:Manual/Fusion 6/3D/Geometry

Primitive Shapes

Fusion supports several basic Primitive Shapes for assembling a 3D scene.

Image Plane

The Image Plane is the basic tool used to place a 2D image into a 3D scene.

Shape

Shape can create planes, cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones and toruses.

Cube

The Cube tool creates a cube with six inputs that allow mapping of different textures to each of the cube's faces.

FBX Mesh

The FBX Mesh tool is used to import mesh geometry from an FBX file. At this time, only static geometry is supported. This tool can only import triangles. The model may need to be converted to triangles when exporting it to the FBX format. The first texture applied to the mesh will also be imported, if available.

Text 3D

The Text 3D tool is a 3D version of the 2D text tool. This version supports beveling and extrusion but does not have support for the multi-layered shading model available from the 2D text tool.

Particles

When a pRender tool is connected to a 3D view, it will export its Particles into the 3D environment. The particles are then rendered using the 3D renderer instead of the particle renderer. See the Particle Suite chapter for more detail.

Visibility

The Visibility Options are found on all 3D source tools. They control object visibility under various conditions.

Visible

If the visibility checkbox is not selected, the object will not visible in the display views, nor will it be rendered into the output image by the Renderer 3D tool. A non-visible object does not cast shadows.

Unseen by Cameras

If the Unseen by Cameras checkbox is selected, the object will be visible in the display views (unless the Visible checkbox is turned off), except when viewed through a camera. The object will not be rendered into the output image by the Renderer 3D tool. Shadows cast by an Unseen object will still be visible when rendered by the software renderer, though not by the OpenGL renderer.

Cull Front Face/Back Face

Use these options to cull (eliminate) rendering and display of certain polygons in the geometry. If Cull Back Face is selected, all polygons facing away from the camera not be rendered, and will not cast shadows. If Cull Front Face is selected, all polygons facing towards the camera will likewise be dropped. Selecting both checkboxes has the same effect as deselecting the Visible checkbox.

Ignore Transparent Pixels in Aux Channels

In Fusion 5 transparent pixels were rejected by the SW/GL renderers. To be more specific the SW renderer rejected pixels with R=G=B=A=0 and the GL renderer rejected pixels with A=0. This is now optional. The reason you might want to do this is to get aux channels (eg. normals, z, UVs) for the transparent bits. For example, suppose in post you want to replace the texture on an 3D element with a texture that is transparent in certain areas with a texture that is transparent in different areas, then it would be useful to have transparent bits set aux channels (in particular UVs). As another example suppose you are doing post DoF... you will probably not want the z channel to be set on transparent areas as this will give you a false depth. Also keep in mind that this rejection is based on the final pixel color including lighting if it is on. So if you have a specular highlight on a clear glass material, this checkbox will not affect it.

FBX Format

The Filmbox FBX format is a scene interchange format first developed by Kaydara to facilitate the transfer of information from motion capture systems to popular 3D systems. Since Kaydara was acquired by Alias, this format has been made available for more general use and is employed extensively as a way of moving scene information from one scene to another.

For exact details on importing FBX scenes, see the Importing Appendix later in this manual.

Importing An FBX Scene

Use the Import FBX utility found under the File>Import menu to create a composition with the same lights, cameras and basic geometry found in an FBX file.

Importing FBX Geometry

The FBX Mesh tool is used to import mesh Geometry from an FBX file. At this time, only static geometry is supported. The first texture applied to the mesh will also be imported, if available.

The imported geometry may be enormous compared to the rest of the scene. Different 3D applications use different units to measure their 3D scenes, and Fusion will treat the scales as equal to its own system. For example, one popular application defaults to using millimeters as its scale. An object that was 100 millimeters in size will import into Fusion as a massive 100 units.

Use the scale slider in the FBX Mesh tool to reduce the scale of such files to something more reasonable for the scene.

FBX Export

You can also export a Fusion 3D scene to other 3d packages using the FBX Export tool. The exporter allows to write into different file formats like *.dae or *.obj. The tool allows to export Geometry, Cameras and Lights. It is also possible to export animation. The animation data is baked frame by frame. Textures and materials cannot be exported. The following example shows a simple scene in Fusion and the exported fbx in Softimage. Each sphere is a single object after the export.