https://www.posetteforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4038&p=45599#p45599 ----------------------------------- Nik Thursday, 25 March 2021, 09:43 PM My AC3D Trial Fortnight's Adventures... ----------------------------------- I've been looking for a CAD-shaped package that is 'OBJ +MTL' friendly since I discovered that TurboCAD were not planning to add support. Worse, although they claimed to have added FBX support, their forum did not care to discuss its effectiveness. In fact, no-one on the forum seemed to have tried the facility, never mind noticed the small problem of rigging variation that currently besets Poser import. A lot of the legacy / free modellers such as Carrara and Hexagon are stuck as x32, cannot cope with the hi-poly models and sets I want to rip or slice to Poser-friendly size. Blender's quirky UI gives me a prompt migraine... So, sorta by default, I came to AC3D. It seemed to tick enough boxes, a complete home/student license would be cheaper than that dubious TurboCAD upgrade and it offered a fortnight's free trial. So, after serendipitously de-bugging network render Box' CPU superfly settings, and belatedly installing my new all-in-one printer that's been on to-do list for several months, I down-loaded the AC3D pack. First oops, Win'10 Defender refused to run the exe. Not watermarked or such. I set my totally paranoid Norton's to work, no dangers found... Second oops, AC3D's 'Help' comes as a lonnnng web page. That is white text on black plus vivid blue section headings, so far so good. But, the side-bar with index is dark gray text on black, barely legible. Well, D'uh... -- AC3D windows etc also had that too-gray on black text format, but the UI lets you change it. And makes that easy to do. Now with an oven-meal heating, I quickly hunted around my archives for some trial models. I needed something interesting to play with, something neither too simple or too complex for this first pass. A pair of potion / perfume bottles for DS, which I'd 'ripped' to OBJ seemed a good start. Unfortunately, they used 'DUF' calls per MC5/MC6 rather than eg JPGs. Then, while browsing my archive of free downloads from ShareCG, AC3D recognised a .BLEND model. It read Blender ? Really ? Yes. And, unlike Blender itself, had a UI that made sense. Although the model, a low-poly 'Martian' ray-gun, lacked texture calls and was too simple to un-group to components, it readily exported to OBJ+MTL. Fumbling through drop-down menus, I found the UV-mapping option I'd noticed earlier. Thirty seconds later, the defaults gave me a nice 1000x1000 auto-distributed template. A couple of minutes wielding a free Irfan View paintbrush produced a clunky JPG texture map. This hand-loaded okay, but adding 'map_Kd map1b.jpg' to the basic MTL using free Notepad made it automatic... Not great art, but you can see progress from the Blender original, via default-gray mesh, its template and the result as OBJ+MTL...