
Previzion uses a standard FBX file format (version 2010.2) which can be generated in most standard 3D packages. The FBX files are created with baked in textures, and the data should be cleaned to removed modeling artifacts like object history, duplicate polygons, excessive polygon count and to keep textures within an 8 GB limit.
It is usually a good idea to run the data past our shading expert to verify that there is not too much other junk floating around in the file, (things like duplicate points and big maya modeling history can cause problems).
There is extensive support for custom shaders in Previzion for reflections, bump maps and other sophisticated surface treatments. Previzion includes a version of these shaders that can be used in Maya so that the performance and look of the models can be tested off line with out tiling up the Previzion system.
Additional shaders can be requested from us if you need a particular look. At this point in time we don’t support sophisticated lighting so baked in textures work the best. The system can handle multiple 2K animated textures and up to 8K texture maps.
As with any real-time system you can slow it down by throwing too much data at it,so generally anything under 500,000 polys and 8K of textures is OK.
A lot of work has been done in developing a Photogrammetry pipeline that enables the designer to create photo realistic models by using a series of overlapping photos of an actual location. This enable them to get a very good and realistic model in a matter of a few days instead of the weeks that it can take to create the same look synthetically. All of these techniques are extensively documented on our web site under the support tab.
Previzion can decode and playback multiple 1920×1080 HD videos encoded in the MPEG2 format.