Transferring Earth Sculptor Terrains into iClone
I wanted to try out the Trial version of Earth Sculptor before committing to buy it. The problem is that certainly at the time, there was no trial version of the iClone Earth Sculptor plug-in, so I had no way of knowing how terrains would look after they had been transferred into iClone. For the trial I did not design a terrain for my Smuggler Bill project. I just wanted something I could knock up quickly.
So I started by downloading the trial version of Earth Sculptor from http://www.earthsculptor.com/ the version at the time was 1.11.
Once I had installed Earth Sculptor I watched the video tutorials which could be accessed from the Reallusion iClone pages. I then set about building myself a simple terrain. As you can see from the picture below I had a go at making an extinct volcano using the Push / Pull tool.
I then applied some textures to give it a bit of colour.
The next step is to select the Export drop down and select “Obj Export”. In the trial version you will be told that exporting the optimised mesh only works in the registered version. So we export the unoptimised mesh anyway. Don’t forget to take note of which directory your obj file gets written to.
Now from the same menu bar Export drop down we select “Terrain Textures”. Don’t forget to take note of which directory your png file gets written to.
Now we launch iClone 3DXchange5 and open the obj file we just exported from Earth Sculptor from the File drop down. This may take a little while and you may get a warning about exceeding the 30,000 face count. I ignore it. This opens the mesh, but we need to also apply the texture. So having highlighted the “Untitled Map” below our opened object shown in the Scene Tree in the panel on the left, we then need to scroll down the Modify panel on the right of the screen until we find the Materials section. about 2/3rd of the way down the Materials section is an “Open” button (it will be greyed out if your object is selected in the Scene Tree on the left instead of its subordinate “Untitled Map”). Click the “Open” button and select the terrain texture png file we exported from Earth Sculptor.
The terrain texture now gets applied to our already open mesh. We are now ready to export out new terrain to iClone itself. From the File drop down we select “Export…” and a new menu pops up which provides some options and allows us to choose our destination folder. I chose the iClone Props folder. Although it will probably be already selected make sure the “Embed External Texture” option is selected. Now save by clicking OK. The file will be saved as an iProp.
Now we can open iClone itself and select our Props folder and hey presto there is our new terrain.
Having opened my volcano in iClone I am wondering if I should just register my copy of Earth Sculptor direct and not buy the add-in. Of course the add-in would be essential if you don’t have 3DXchange and I am sure it is more convenient than the process I have described above. Having said that once you have followed this process of using 3DXchange once it is very straight forward.