This is an archive of CompuServe forum messages from 1985 to 1995, as saved in transcripts by John Foust.
Search Results (202 messages)
Timothy, Oops, sorry; credit where credit is due, and all that. I think I was going on my 16th hour straight at the keyboard when I wrote that — the 4:04 time on the offending message was A.M.! (Been modelling my a** off!) I'm not entirely sure about this, but…
Peter, Could be wrong, but all the ads I've seen say they're for Win3.x/Win95… Even if it DID work for a DOS session, the trade-offs would make it a dubious proposition at best, IMHO. SCL
Hamid, if you're getting the tearing problem when you rendered whole frames (not fields), then I'll bet you still had the PAR set for importing fields. Note that when you're importing fields and looking at the single frames as they come in, it's not going to look right even when…
Had same problem; go into 3DS.SET and change FIELD-RENDER-ORDER to the other way (can't remember which is which, but the problem is that you've got it backwards.)
Alan, Looks like that could be a viable solution for my Pentium now/P6 or Alpha in the spring dilemma. Definitely worth paying a visit to my local DEC dealer. Thanx! SCL
Martin, I'd certainly be interested in cool/useful public domain tools, as well. Could you post a msg. where they are, or upload 'em to the libs, or something? Thanx, SCL
Dave, Yeah, I'd pretty much come to the same conclusion about the variable variables. I agree with most of what Rick Miller says, about creating a .PRJ to d/l for those who want to participate, with but one quibble. I agree that we need a longer render time now, so…
Kelly, Fortunately, I also got my copy yesterday. (The mailman asked me a question about IK heirarchies!
Alan, Were you saying that a single Alpha would probably be faster than two P5/150s? What I'm primarily wondering about is if there's a performance hit on the mobo/daughtercard machines as opposed to something that's strictly an Alpha machine. Thanx for the info. SCL
Kevin, I'm not sure if this'll help, but a DOS-based flic player that loads the entire flic into RAM (assuming you've got enough) is available from GRAPHVENA forum in VRLI Inc.'s lib. It's called PLAYFL.LZH. The .LZH extension is a compressed format like a .ZIP, if you hadn't run across…
Geoff, This doesn't have anything to do with a bungee-jumping caveman, does it? Both your flics are the same resolution and same number of frames, right? I'm asking because you started with 45 frames, but if you rendered frames 0 through 45, then you've now got 46. If you re-render…
Alan, I sure hope you'll post anything of interest to someone considering buying one now, with the thought of upgrading to Alphas when (if) Max for Alpha NT comes out… Thanx SCL
Mark, Though they'd physically fit (pins line up and all), I'd have serious misgivings about the increased clock speed on the VESA bus burning up a card designed for ISA speeds. In other words, I wouldn't try it, even if you don't care about the ISA card, 'cuz when it…
Oops; I'd gotten the impression from their ads that it _could_ be used as an ordinary external drive housing (didn't have to be a RAID array). Thanx for setting me straight. SCL
FWIW, my 2 cents worth, the only REAL competition for MAX is gonna be MicroSoftImage. (Unless/until other SGI packages start coming out with NT ports.) By the time you add enough plug-ins to MAX that they come out close to equal, feature for feature, I'll bet the prices are gonna…
The VistaPro 3.1 CD-ROM (Windows 3.x or DOS) has 3D map data for the whole country, importable into 3DS. They have a forum here, under one of the GRAPHVEN directories, I think. Company name is VRLI. Only problem you might have is, when they say the U.S., they mean the…
Mike, Thanks for the elucidation. I'm looking forward to hearing from you once you got it up and running. (And rendering Chevy.3DS!) SCL
Well, for one thing right off, AniPro will easily do the chroma keying for that project you were asking about (8-bit color). Animator Studio will do much the same thing, but with 24-bit color. SCL
Mike, Thanx for the scoop! A $300 speed doubler? How could I go wrong? SCL
Reza, FWIW, I've had no trouble at all with my ATI Graphics ProTurbo VESA, and once ATI got their PCI drivers sorted out (about 4 months ago), the PCI version was fine too. SCL
Hey, Mike, Glad to hear your about your trip to visit Mark… Your msg. cleared up some minor wonderings I had. Are you getting the 512K pipeline cache? It sounds like you're using the onboard EIDE controller for the system disk, is that to avoid using a PCI slot? Mark's…
Lessee, Alpha comes _before_ beta, right? SCL
Hi, Mike, What kind of 486 did you have before, that took 20 min.? Since I'm still suffering with my DX2/66, I gotta know if it'd help me that much!!! Thanx, SCL
Jeez, and I heard it stands for Digital Fine Adjustment! SCL
Well, I figure since I'm not the only one, at least it means my mailman doesn't have secret aspirations to break into the exciting and fast-paced world of 3D animation… SCL
I'm _trying_ to check out 3D Design. Got an offer for a free trial issue, sent it back in. (Weeks ago.) Haven't gotten free issue yet, but they were real quick to send a bill! Anybody else still waiting? SCL
Yeah, it's kind of like the famous triad I first heard of when I was in the typography biz — Best Quality Best Turnaround Time Best Price Pick any two. SCL
Geoff, Glad it worked out for you. Your new question makes perfect sense. If whatever you're using to move the sprites around supports alpha channels, you're home free. If it doesn't, you're getting into chroma keying (about which whole books could be and probably have been written), and you're going…
Good Plant Material
Message #194828
How did we get on Silicon Graphics? Or if you mean Silicon Garden, it's one of the Yost Group IPAS disks. (#5, I think) There are lots of places to get that — try your 3DS dealer first.
John,] PVR is Perception Video Recorder, successor to and made by the same people as the PAR. Haven't actually ordered the system yet (trying to hold out until P150 is released – rumor sez beginning of Nov.) but I've been talking to Mark DeMazza of Mind Computer Consultants, CIS #…
Yeah, I saw Martin's numbers — an extra HOUR!!!! 'Friends don't let friends render to swap files!' SCL
Tom, Have you tried attaching the roof to the walls? This might do the trick. Another thing to try is increase the size of your shadow map. I find that bumping it up to 1024 will often help shadow anomalies, particularly with (relatively) distant sun-type lights. Hope this helps, SCL
Hi, Rick I think most of the times uploaded were with Metal shading. BTW, I've been talking to Mark DeMazza. Everything looks good! SCL
Tim, At risk of jumping to a wrong conclusion, the reason for your intermittent crashes _could_ be a too-small FILES= line in your config. I've set mine to FILES=40, because in the beginning, I was getting seemingly random and intermittent crashes. Not now! If by some chance your config doesn't…
John, I'd broached the subject of compiling all these numbers into one reference doc to Anne when this all started. She replied that she was forwarding the msg to the FA of Hardware (I think she said Greg Pyros). I haven't heard anything on the subject since, but I've got…
#1-
Mb SIMMs wtd.
Message #194729
I have a friend who was injured on his job. He's on Disability, and the state offered him retraining in desktop publishing. His money is VERY tight, so he's been trying to run Win apps in 4 megs o' RAM. Desperately needs another 4 megs. He can't pay much, but…
Nicolas, The project I was referring to, the co. had Silicon Garden, I used its Forest setting, individually shift-rotated about 3 doz. trees. It was for 640×480, 8-bit color flythru at apparent speed of a car doing about 35 mph. The extra planes worked to really improve the "3D-ness" of…
I'm doing virtually the same thing, and have costed out a P133, 64 megs, 2G system HD, PVR w/4G, hot video card w/4 megs, 4x CD-ROM, sound card, top-of-the-line 17" monitor, etc. Total is $10.5K. So, by shaving a little here and a little there, you could get a single-CPU…
Yeah, that's the sort of thing that can sneak up on you… Glad you got it solved. Good luck w/ your boss. Tell 'im that to keep these problems from happening in the future, you need (x) IPAS. (Fill in name of one you really want, but you know he'd…
Lights
Message #194589
Hi again, Anne, I guess you had to get off. Re: the shadow-casting omni lights question… Anyway, I re-searched and discovered I had a mistaken assumption about the way the search engine works with multiple keywords. So I found it. Oh, well, learn something every day… Thanx, SCL
flicker frames HELP
Message #194519
I hate to admit it, but you've almost got me stumped. The reason I was talking about the 256 color options was that you hadn't mentioned previously what your output was, and it was a possibility. None of that palette stuff applies if your output is .tga's. I think the…
So you want good looking trees, but a low vertex count, too, eh? Beelzebub's got a devil put aside for you! Seriously, the look of x-ed cutouts is significantly improved if, in Editor from top vpt, you shift-rotate each one 45 degrees, giving you an additional two planes for each…
Hmmmmm… Something to do with shininess, maybe? A big difference between your ambient, diffuse and specular colors? I assume you've checked the tracks of all your lights (including ambient). Is there a bump map? Are you rendering to 256 colors? If so, you could try turning off Dither 256, and/or…
Betcha what's happening is your Win mouse settings are getting invoked instead of your DOS mouse settings. Don't know how the fix was done (somebody else actually solved it) but a coworker had the same problem not long ago (under WfWG and DOS) and I thought this might provide a…
Thanx for the clarification. SCL
'Swell foop' is a (I think the right word) malapropism for 'fell swoop'. That sounds like a neat idea (wave motion in rotating venetian blinds)… Glad you were able to solve it. SCL
#flicker frames HELP
Message #194329
Sounds like the notorious Pentium FPU bug to me!!! Seriously, is your concrete material using any SXPs? If it is, you might be able to fix it with different parameters, or by creating a concrete material without SXPs. Hope this helps, SCL
Hope you have by now discovered it's not as bad as it sounds… My own guesstimate of how long it'd take was two, maybe three hours, depending on how adept at PSP you are… Hope it came out fine! SCL
#PVR /Micron / whatever
Message #194327
Kevin, That's the board I was referring to, but I'd heard that none of the slots were shared…
OK, Glen, I'd assume you want cross-sections where the bulkheads are. This is going to be a bit of a sticky wicket for you because it sounds like you aren't hitting the deform/fit/gen path command, which is why it's coming out misshapen. When you do that, your path vertices are…
Page 2 of 5