Quickstart

OBJ2FACT is basically a simple drag and drop tool and it is very easy to use. But there are some factors in the process of exchange of OBJ data to the FACT file format that take special attention.

The following pages are a very simple walkthrough. Take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the main concepts involved in using OBJ2FACT, it will be well worth your time.

Do your first conversion

Enable UV mapping in EI

Place a texture onto the UV space

The fact that an application outputs an OBJ file does not automatically mean that it is of any use to you. It is important that the OBJ you are converting is properly structured. During the development of OBJ2FACT we came across some very poor formatted OBJ models. We have added features to address most of these problems. Some problems, like super complex, nonplanar polygons can cause problems for OBJ2FACT. In cases such as this, the best solution is to go back to the modeler and triangulate nonplanar polygons for planarity.

An OBJ model can contain four main blocks of information: points, UV-coordinates, normals and faces. Some applications do not include all of the blocks of information in their OBJ files. Here's how OBJ2FACT handles the missing information:

• If the UV-coordinates in an OBJ file are missing, there is no way for OBJ2FACT to reconstruct them.
  
• If the normals are missing, OBJ2FACT will only be able to approximate the original shading of the object.
  

OBJ files created by Electric Images 2.9.2 do not contain UV-coordinates and are not as "cleanly" formatted as they could be. Use the OBJimprover utility to improve the quality of the standard EI 2.9.2 OBJs to use them in other applications that read OBJs.

And now go create some awsome stuff.

ramjac Images - April 2005