Other Great Places

Model Properties

Most of the models are here are accurate scale models of the original object. Old buildings and interior rooms are scaled according to the "kanejaku" system of measurement. They also use the tatami mat as the basic unit of area measure, and the shoji screen as the basic unit of vertical wall measure. This is in accord with traditional Japanese construction methods. Ffurnishing, utensils, weaponry and so forth are scaled in accord with their original measures.

Texture materials for our models are almost always original and are those that would have been used in the real object. For example, if in the real world, a garden gate was made of redwood and gold cedar woods, we will have taken original photos of these wood species, and applied them to the model of the garden gate. In this way, your garden gate model will be an authentic model of the original gate. Stone textures come from our original photos. Pottery and ceramic textures are taken from photos of the original objects, often with the assistance and help of the museums now in curation of the object.

Texture files are almost always larger than in typical 3D models. This allows you to scale your model up and down within a scene, or come close for a view without the texture appearing pixilated or unrealistic. If the texture is tiled, the tiling instructions are contained within the model file format.

Most models you will find here are in a special, high quality .3ds file format.

The .3ds file format is nearly universal. Models in this format can be imported into MAX, Lightwave, Cinema4D, MAYA, Terragen, Vue d' Esprit, Poser*, Bryce and most other 3D programs.

Some models are published in Vue d'Esprit, Bryce, Poser or Cinema4D format. We publish models in these formats whenever the models can take advantage of special textures or other features unique to these programs. For example, models of ocean surf can use a special Vue d' Esprit foamy surf material, so these models are published in both the .3ds and the Vue .vob file formats. In all such cases, any additional special textures or materials will be included in the packages.

We can convert any model to the following formats. MAX (*.max), Lightwave (*.lwo), Wavefront (*.obj), Bryce (*.obo), Softimage (*.xsi), Truespace (*.cob), DirectX (*.x), VRML, Shockwave 3D (*.w3d) and Unreal Character (*.psk) file formats. If you need a model in one of these formats instead of the one in which it is published, just ask for the alternative format when making your purchase.

All the models have disciplined hierarchical structures, component groupings and use straightforward naming conventions. If you are a modeler or you are using a program such as Vue 'd Esprit, Truespace or MAX and the model has a component whose properties are intended to be customizable, you should be able to locate the components you need to change with a minimum of fuss.

___ * Please be aware that Poser Pro Pak appears to have a bug in it which causes intermittant errors when importing any form of .3ds model. This bug is not present in Poser 4 or Poser 5.