hi guys,

Something that has been on my mind a while is how to correlate the size/scale & units from 3D modeling programs to what you see in Away3D. Blender has always been somewhat ambiguous as per units while MAX is more clear, yet I’ve not read anything on how Away3D handles distance/size/scale units. I realize it’s actually all relative since anything can be scaled as you want it, but is there some way to standardize units in/for Away3D?

For instance, say I have collected a number of building models from different sources and would like to use them all together in a scene but they all have different scales that need to be matched. Is there a “best” initial size/scale for the models that everything should be matched to?

Away3D is like Blender in that it uses an abstract “unit”. This of course mean that you can ascribe any real-life measurement to that unit. Treat it like metres, inches or kilometers if you want. It’s a relative measurement anyway, meaning that if you are 10 metres away from something that is 1 meter tall, it will look the same as if you had been 10 inches away from something that is 1 inch tall. So if in your application it makes sense to use inches, just establish (within your team) that one unit should be one inch.

Now, the problem that you describe has nothing to do with Away3D units really. If you receive building models from different modelers that use different tools, and those models hence have different scale, there would be no way for Away3D (or you) to know their relative size in the first place, regardless of the semantics of Away3D’s units. So what you will need to do there is to either ask the modelers about the scale (and resize the models accordingly as they come in), or make sure that they all use the same scale within their tools.

As for a preferred scale, it’s really not hugely relevant, but it makes sense to stick with the default (where a camera distance of 1000 units is the initial set-up) because near/far clipping et c is optimized for this layout. But of course these can all be changed, and as long as the relations between values are the same, the scale doesn’t matter.