Hmm i have no idea. I just had a look at their site, watched their movie and browsed through their pages a bit, found the chart comparison and saw that export to 3ds is only working for the infinite version.
I would have been interested to know how good exported terrains are if you can use them in realtime graphics. So the vertices (all in all <=65535) would matter and if the baked texturing (up to a 2k texture) is working.
I would be able to import 3ds so if you have an example lying around i would be curious to have a look at it.
.3DS Export means MESH export - my Esprit version can happily export terrains to .3DS, .LWO, .COB, .OBJ to name a few as well as export it as a texture. I checked it and theres sliders for:
mesh resolution
low to high, low: 256 vertices, 512 polygons, high: 65536 vertices and 131071 polygons
Generate material maps
Color and Bump, in .BMP, .GIF, .TGA, .JPG etc formats
Material map resolution
low to high, low: 10*10, high: 2000*2000 (slightly sucks that it not power of two 2K, but scaling it up that little does not reduce the quality really)
Check the compare pages for other terrain / model export/import differences between versions... but if you're after terrain export only you don't have to get the Infinite. My Esprit also loads .3DS objects happily with full UVs and texctures in place. Snippet from the help:
Importing Objects
Vue 5 provides a comprehensive set of import filters that can be used to import objects from other major 3D applications.
Supported file formats are:
· DXF: Standard AutoCAD (raw geometry with groups, no textures),
· OBJ: Standard Wavefront (raw geometry with groups, texture UV mapping information),
· 3DS: 3D Studio (raw geometry with groups, texture conversion),
· LWO: LightWave 5 (raw geometry with groups, texture conversion), and
· SHD: Shade 6 geometry with textures.
· COB: TrueSpace 5 (raw geometry with groups, texture conversion).
· PZ3, PZZ: Poser 4 and 5 static model import filter (raw geometry with groups, texture conversion). If the scene is animated in Poser, the first frame will be loaded. You can import fully animated Poser characters using Mover.
It is also possible to import USGS Digital Elevation Model data (DEM) directly (see above), or using the import feature of the Terrain Editor.
Both the 3D Studio and LightWave import filters go incredibly far in the conversion of existing materials, converting such complex effects as color, bump, transparency and reflection maps, and even some procedural settings! The picture opposite illustrates the power of these filters; it displays a very nice 3DS fighter model from the Science Fiction Modeling Alliance, rendered in Vue 5, untouched from conversion.
To import an object from another application, select the menu command File | Import Object, or press File in the Objects browser (you display this by pressing the icon). A standard file browser appears that lets you select the file you want to convert. The conversion itself can be quite long (up to several minutes), especially when converting DXF or OBJ objects. Please note that Vue 5 features some of the fastest object imports around…
