I’m having troubles syncing my projects units in away3d with prefab3d units. In my away3d project I am working in meters and in prefab3d I would also like to use meters as my units, but when I try to import a model it always says it’s too small and wants me to scale it.

If I don’t scale it in Prefab3d it is hard to work with (look at attached image). Things get in the way (large gray ball) and it’s hard to see the x/y/z lines.

Right now the only solution I can think of is to let Prefab3D scale it up some amount and then when I load it in my Away3D project I would scale it back down.

Are there any other options I’m missing as I’m new to both Away3D and Prefab3D.

A feature that would be really handy would to be able to scale back down on export. Or somehow let me use a smaller unit size in Prefab3D and just have those grid lines, axis lines and that gray ball scale down in size as well.

Thanks!

That’s a good point, but see, what is a meter? is it 100 units or 8.75?
I remember compare same model outputed from various apps and not really get same results while units we set to same…

As it’s all about ratio, best is to scale your project so that it fits all. Working in flash at very small size might also become a source of errors, roundings…
So as a unit can be anything, it’s up to you to define it as you please. x100 or x1000… Prefab gives you an hint regarding the minimum scale it should have, tho personnally, I work slightly larger, in range of 10 to 300k. Working much larger may also introduce problems. I’ve seen weird matrices fx too…

That having said, I’ll think about adding some options for this…

Regarding export scaling option: All exporters have it already, but it’s not exposed yet, because of some unresolved issues with animation exports. The day they’ll be fixed, I’ll simply add the scaling stepper to the ui.

Well, this stuff is all very new to me and I thought a unit was always whatever you decided you wanted it to be. Once you decided on that you would always model your objects with the correct dimensions based on the unit you chose. I guess it sounds like units are just that and you define in the modeling program what 1 unit equals.

You see, I’m working with Box2D and apparently (according to the docs) it works best with meters. So I figured 1 unit would be 1 meter just to make both systems blend well together.

Perhaps it would be best if I work with centimeters in Away3D and Prefab3D but just remember to convert any positions, velocities, etc… down to centimeters when getting that info from Box2D to plug into my Away3D virtual world.

If I do that then my models should be easier to work with in Prefab3D and I should have more resolution in the game world and less issues with rounding errors, etc…

Thanks for the program!

edit: hmmm, I think I would rather work in millimeters instead of cm actually.