3d Pre visulatation for a stage show

simply model your stage design, make some texture coords on the surfaces that you want to project on, export as FBX and render realtime using KnM 3d.

No big deal actually, thats my workflow for all my stage designs. I even previz the smoke and moving lights, it works nicely within the QC environment.

You can use my model loader as well, if you are so inclined: http://v002.info/?page_id=44

From what you're describing, I would make (or obtain) all of the model except the screen, import that, and render. Then I would create the curved screen section by using multiple GL Triangles (whether kineme, mesh creator, or your own programming), and manually place it. I'm not sure if it would be easier to just create your triangles so that they form the arch, or whether you could just use a grid and shader. The easiest/fastest way to do your curved screen might be to use the GLSL grid, a shader that curves the vertices of the grid, and allows you to texture it.

I don't have an opinion on what's best, but it is pretty easy to chop out stuff from a scene if it's sketchup (skp) format, and it's ( the exported collada) supported without plugins. At the same time, it's not terribly hard to chop out parts of a model or scene using many different available systems.

That sounds like exactly want I want to do, but I am having a little trouble working out how to place a texture on only certain parts of a mesh in Kn3d, do you have a basic example of the setup you use like a cube with different images on 2 faces. If not not to worry I am sure I can work it out. What software do people use to build there models and what format are people bringing there models into QC. Thanks again for the help and really excited about the prospect of easier show pre-vis. Cheers Steve

In most modeling programs you can specify the uv coordinates and/or texture indices. By controlling those, you can make a single image map onto a 3D object however you wish, whether you use K3D and plug into the image port, or use a texture type GLSL shader to get a texture on your object.

If an object isn't UV mapped, you can usually tell pretty quickly, because it will just look like one or two pixels have been stretched over the entire object.

I'm a big fan of sketchup because it's free, most engineering and architecture firms are familiar with it and have a few people that are go-to sketchup people, landscaping and interiors dept's are familiar with it, marketing usually uses it for brochures, etc. It's easy to manipulate, delete out sub-objects, export different versions etc. In QC, using the built in collada importer/renderer, all of the texture loading happens automatically with dae (what you usually export to from skp/sketchup), so that's a win for me, because it tends to look good. It's sort of hard to argue with it when the process is so easy.

Sketchup also has a tremendous amount of building block type objects for modeling, tools and available plugins.

Meshlab is another good free, opensource alternative, that's pretty straightforward, and has a bunch of tools for manipulating and creating models... it can read and export many model types. If those two can't do it, I turn to Blender, which pretty much always can do whatever the other two come up short in.

I'm attaching a little composition that doesn't do the "opposing faces" but illustrates how you would need to essentially make a little grid of many smaller images, mapped out in the right size and origin, to map this particular cube so that a separate image is on each face. By default, the image would just stretch out over everything. I'm using an affine tile to create the small "pic sheet grid" because I don't have anything handy to create a bunch of small images that are the correct size.