This is an archive of CompuServe forum messages from 1985 to 1995, as saved in transcripts by John Foust.
Search Results (362 messages)
Greg: How does the Bandit's JPEG compression look with typical 3DS-rendered models? Everything that I've read says that JPEG is best at "natural" images and not quite as good with synthetic ones. I would imagine that a synthetic image that uses 24 bit color might be a lot closer to…
#Extra Memory for 3DS
Message #46765
I'm currently running 3DS at work on a 486 DX2-50 machine with 32MBy of memory. I've bumped into the 32 Meg limit a couple of times so I would like to add more memory but my CPU is maxed out – it is a CPU on a card and ALL…
Gus: I've been following your thread and oticed that you are using a Bandit box. How do you like it, and how do you have it configured? Chris P.S. I'm looking at getting one and I've wanted to talk to somebody that has actually used one.
But he(she?) melts into such a nice little yellow puddle! Unfortunately, the beady little eyes end up floating above the pool of duck stuff, since they are different objects. If I were doing it again (and I might!) I would have them hang there while the duck melts and then…
Brian: In some of the examples, you nead two characters. I was thinking of the duck that is one of the demo geometries – it looks like the duck from "The Bored Room" factory sequence. We also need something to drop from a building… —>> How about a Newell Teapot?!
Brian: Were you thinking of one long video that illustrated all 10 rules or a series of 10 shorter ones that illustrated them one at a time? I was originally thinking of the latter. For instance, you could use the bird from the BIRDWALK.3DS file to illustrate #1 – it…
Brian: I've got the IPAS developer's toolkit already, I refer to something that people have been calling the 3DSLIB – a library for writing code to interface with 3DS. For instance, I have a need to insert X,Y,Z position data for an object from the outside world into the positions…
3DSLIB
Message #42875
DOes anybody have any news on the 3DSLIB that was supposed to be available from Autodesk? They aren't answering my faxes. Maybe if I send one every day…
Ken: We have two Lyon-Lamb controllers at work. One is a MiniVAS and the other is a ProVAS. Both have worked so far but there has always been one feature of the MiniVAS that dosen't work. Lyon-Lamb's answer has been: 1) Update the ROMS, then 2) Send it back. No…
I've had trouble getting any response at all from ADesk on 3DSLIB. I've sent a couple of FAXes to their multimedia group and gotten no response. Can you give me any background on it or should I keep beating on them? Chris
Gary: Sure, nuclear electric with moondust (or locally generated hydrogen, but you might want to save that for other uses) would let you run the motors continually at minimal cost. I wouldn't be too comfortable cruising at altitudes that low, particularly in space. I would rather fly a parabolic arc…
Realistic World Maps?
Message #37018
The satellite photograph of the world without clouds is **definitely** copyrighted! We had a 35mm slide on loan to us at work and it came with what amounted to a license agreement that it wouldn't be copied, scanned, etc. I thought about its utility as a texture map for making…
Gary: I heard the Pinnochio reference, but I think that Data is more like the Tin Woodsman from the Wizard of Oz. I woukd certainly consider him to be a person, just not a human. Like Picard told him one time – we're all machines of one type or another.…
Gary: I don't agree entirely with your replace robot with dog quote. Many of the episodes about Data are really stories that use his innocence and lack of emotion to explore relationships between people. These are pretty basic themes, but Star Trek uses the starship, the Federation, and the rest…
Rick: The article on hot broadcast colors is from the Graphics Gems II book. I can probably arrange to connect you with this article one way or another. EMAIL me an address. Chris
Gary: I tend to agree with you about wanting accuracy in SF films, but I think that I can see the filmmaker's side of it, too. In both Star Wars and Star Trek (and especially in Star Trek!) the ships are the vehicle for telling a story, not the primary…
Rick: I read your message about illegal NTSC colors and it reminded me that I've seen an article about that subject recently ……. ….. Ok, there is an article about it in: Graphics Gems II Edited by James Arvo Academic Press,Inc. 1991 ISBN 0-12-064480-0 III.6 "Television Color Encoding and "Hot"…
Gary: To be fair to Star Wars, they did study a lot of air combat films when they designed the motion of the small ships. I think that a large part of this was to tie into a visual language that everybody is already familiar with – **everybody** has seen…
Gary: I thought that Babylon 5 was OK, but nothing spectacular. I've read a lot about the computer based effects and the fleet of Amigas, but I thought that the models **looked** like they were done on a computer, which is bad news. The surfaces were too smooth and uniform…
#35570-
why does 3ds reboot?
Message #35700
Joe: Sure! If you have any questions about why things are set up that way just ask. Chris
Thanks, I hadn't seen that message. I'll drop them a note (or a fax) and see what happens. Thanks.
Thanks. I'll talk to them about 3DSLIB. Chris > I'm _totally_ out of that loop. Isn't that what George Bush kept saying about Iran/Contra?…
Thanks. I think that the person that asked me about reading .VUE files was interested in accident reconstruction, but I've had occasion to handle 3 axis accelerometer data from one of the space shuttle flights (USML-1) and was thinking about building an animation around the data. Is there a release…
#.VUE input
Message #33101
Gary & Co. : I got a calltoday from someone that was wondering if it was possible to read a .VUE file **into** 3DS. They have position data vs time for an object that they want to animate in 3DS, but they would rather not adjust the key positions by…
More Vigital Dideo
Message #31963
I just got another flyer from Fast Forward Video on their Bandit box. It looks to be a similar gizmo to their Outlaw in that it uses JPEG compression to put about 30 sec of video into its internal 32 Meg of memory. It looks to be designed to transfer…
#31088-
3ds or Animator??
Message #31177
Andy: There are good psuedo random number generators out there, but they take a lot of work to get right. What you look for in part is an extremely long repeat time. I see your point about using the same generator to pick the autolotto and the numbers. But maybe…
AndY; I've got both Animator Pro and 3DS and I can't imagine doing animation without both. Animator Pro is a good 2D animation program – think of it as a supercharged version of a paint program with animation features. It does very nice 2D and fake 3D animations and is…
The **BIG** advantage of moving to a wider range of compilers is that you open up the IPAS writing community. There could be a lot of people writing IPAS code if the compilers were more accessable. Chris
I understand why the Adesk products use the Phar Lap tools, it is just that the SDK and the compilers that work with it are EXPENSIVE. I can buy myself a copy of Watcom and the Phar Lap tools at work, but I would hesitate to spend the money at…
Rich: I'm at Lewis, in the Processing Science and Technology Branch. We are most of the Materials Division's microgravity materials science effort. The branch includes the Microgravity Materials Science Lab and the Computational Materials Lab. I've been using 3DS to help with visualization on a couple of our projects. One…
The word that **I** got on the IPAD dev kit was that it would be available "in a couple of weeks" and they would call and tell me when it was available, and for how much… Chris
Phil: Thanks for the information on using Watcom C for writing IPAS routines. I don't know how to do it, considering the requirement for the Phar Lap extender, but it would be really nice if you could use a wider range of compilers to write IPAS routines. I bet that…
Will we need the PharLap SDK too, or just the Watcom compiler? Chris
Ana: I keep hoping that the improvements in recordable video disk technology leads to a substantial drop in price so that a high quality single frame editing video disk becomes available at a reasonable price. Chris
I use stacker on my machines at home and at work. There is the potential for a problem on a particularly nasty crash, but if you keep reasonable backups of your system, the recovery isn't too bad. I backup my work system to a DAT tape every week (at a…
Sure! I had a lot of problems with with my modular furnace project. The segments had a Big hole in the center and when I tried to cut them in half I ended up with a lot of long thin faces jumping the gap. I ended up importing the DXF…
Ang: I render to disk all of the time with field rendering on. In fact, almost all of my animations get dumped to disk in .TGA format and I lay them down on tape later. That way, I can make as many "master" tapes as I need to without re-rendering.…
I've found the same thing – the boolean operations work best with simple objects. I found that they sometimes result in stranded vertices – if I cut a thick disk in half by subtracting a box from the full disk I sometimes get a vertex or two floating out in…
I just got a Wavefront demo tape and they had cleverly added "Wavefront" and the name of the organization that did the animation to the bottom of the scenes. That way, any use of the animation automatically carries the names of the people that did it. Chris
New User
Message #28053
Jeff: More Memory!!! I'm running a 486/50 at work with 32Meg and I've run it out of memory (which isn't a disaster – it just starts swapping to disk which slows it down a lot) on a model that was complicated (a lot of curves that had to look smooth).…
Thanks, I'll give them a call. Chris
Is there going to be a IPAS developer's kit? All of the IPAS disks look great (and I've already written an order for a couple) but I can see that writing my own routines might be the only way to do some of the things that I need to do.…
Gus: I'm using a Sony VO-5850 u-Matic 3/4" Editing VCR and a Lyon Lamb ProVas animation controler. The recorder was about $5500 (??) and the ProVas a couple of $K. DiaQuest makes some nice animation controllers, too. Chris
Yup. I keep assigning materials in my bigger projects and wondering if I got everything, and what materials I've assigned. Chris
Scene Info…
Message #25276
I looked at the Scene Info command and it dosen't do what I have in mind. (It **is** a useful command, just not what I had in mind.) What I'm suggesting would be more like including the material name with the object name when you do a Surface/Material/Assign/By Name That…
It would be nice to be able to move to a frame with a key in it and somehow autoselect the object that the key refers to. I don't know how to solve cases with multiple keys in one frame, but maybe it could be a way to select an…
No! I'll go look at Scene Info right away and see if it does what I had in mind. Thanks, Chris
#More annoying suggestion
Message #25038
I've got another suggestion or two: It would be nice if there was a command that lists each part by name along with whatever material is attached. I end up spending a lot of time keeping track of what parts I've assigned materials to and what materials I've assigned. A…
Thanks, I'll try it. Chris
Doug: I could use time/segment but it dosen't always make the best use of my rendering time. The rendering shortcuts that I proposed would make it less necessary to animate in segments. Do you know of a easy way to delete all the keys in an animation? I have one…
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