This is an archive of CompuServe forum messages from 1985 to 1995, as saved in transcripts by John Foust.
Search Results (1,099 messages)
I'll find out more in the next week or so and give you a call. (If your phone is different than before, you could send it by CIS email) The project is stand-alone, touch-screen, running from a HD, and I don't know who will provide the information. About MAX, from…
[Continued] Michelle, it's me again. Here is the old boolean message. [reply to an old message:] Hey Jim! Booleans & face problems, eh? My favorite subject… (the booleans, not the faces) I forgot whether your original message was simply about face problems or about completing booleans. As for tesselation, it…
Here are the 2 best messages we have a booleans from the Boolean-Master : Hi Michele, Boolean King? I hardly think so! However, since I do a lot of the mechanical things you refer to, I've done a big pile of booleans and have had to figure things out. 1>…
Hey Steve, Are you still associated with BJU? My supervisor told me last week he had some money for me to do something on this project, namely, to locate someone in a university setting that could put together the kiosk software. Evidently, it's been decided that we, as a government…
>>Gloria tested with MAX… Hello Tom, and thanks for clearing this up. As I implied in my message, I suspected some sort of information hole (rather than dirty tricks) My personal dealings with both Omnicomp and ELSA have been positive. I suspect that particular dealer may have been somewhat biased…
Recycle mesh map problem
Message #191340
>>lofting RECYCLE… Julieta, I looked at the recycle symbol mesh you uploaded. I haven't noticed if you got any help on this yet, so if you have, just ignore the rest of this. As you implied, the bent arrow would be tricky to loft. I got a start by creating…
>>Monterrey… Hey John, I have a brand new TB Monterrey that I'll part with – a Really Good Deal. After I bought it I decided I would be better off with a lower-end card for what I was doing, so I bought a different TB. (I was going to send…
Hey, MF dude, Good tip on materials as selection sets. I never thought of using the same material with a different name just for selecting. When working on a single obj in a large scene, I generally ditch the whole scene and work on just one object or two -…
>>which Glint boards… Good question. At Siggraph, an Omnicomp board was being used to in the MAX demo. However the Omnicomp needs a separate VGA card to boot and I didn't want to waste an additional slot. I nearly bought an ELSA since 3DLabs, the Glint maker, said it was…
>>rotating path… I don't know if there is an easier way, but this is how I rotate a simple keyframer path (I don't know how it will work for linked objects): -Save the project containing the orig path to disk as a .3DS file (not as a .PRJ). -In the…
>>camera flipping… Hello Hansoo, The camera gyrations are a result of the code that normally keeps the camera horizontal to the scene while moving it around. When aimed straight up or straight down, a singularity occurs where the direction "down" is ambiguous relative to the bottom of the camera viewport.…
>>laptops… Hi Steve! I don't specifically have experience with the 755 but I have 3DS4 installed on an IBM Thinkpad 750C and it runs well in the VESA mode. The biggest problem with using it for real work is the memory (I only have 12M in this machine) It's great…
Hello Alex, I enjoyed meeting you at Pyros's place at Siggraph. Great work on the refraction mapping ipas! You mentioned PMATH.PXP. Have you had any luck with PMATH? I tried it yesterday and with the preset formulas (great shell, eh?!) or with my own formulas, I get the same result:…
>>how can I reorient faces and edges… Peter, It is relatively easy to adjust a mesh an put edges and vertices exactly where you want them. It requires some manual editing but is often necessary for a smooth mesh. Of course, you need to properly apply smoothing groups to a…
>>lighting the universe… I recently had a rotating earth shot with the sun moving from behind. The earth had a separate cloud layer. To get a soft falloff on the earth and atmosphere, I had to carefully place a spotlight AND several omni lights in a row in front of…
>>Spyglass… Carlton, I have two packages here, Slicer by Spyglass, and Voxelbox (volume renderer) by Jaguar Software. It's been a while so I can't remember the details, but I remember some kind of deal in the works between the two companies with more 3D volume software comming. At any rate,…
Why Mr GP, how very helpful you are, once again. I think we'll keep you. JKJ, Oak Ridge, TN
>>I prefer the AT- Vista… it will show me a 720×486 >>image on the display while net-rendering Hey dude, how do you do this? When I click the Net Queue button in the Render dialog, the Display button goes out.
Dear Puzzled, I just had this Jamie Clay message fragment passed to me: o Get QEMM 7.04 (actually you can't yet purchase this, but you can get the patch to QEMM 7.x on CIS in the QEMM forum) o Then you use the(undocumented) SCANMEM command to display the amount of…
>>no face build pickbox… That is the way it's worked in every version of 3DS I've used. This sometimes makes it difficult to precisely place and "attach" the second and third vertices of a face. I generally try to attach the longest edge first. Also, move the mouse around a…
Great. Remember that this problem will show up if an object simply intersects the _plane_ of the mirror – it doesn't have to intersect the actual mirror. Check out the manual for more detail. JKJ
#MIRROR.PRJ problem
Message #189406
Hello Greg L., I looked at your MIRROR.PRJ file a minute ago. You seem to have run into a mirror-clipping event. If you set MIRROR-CLIP-ANY=ON in the 3DS.SET file, the mirror will reflect properly with the .prj file exactly as uploaded. Check out the section about flat mirrors in the…
>>concession… I read that they admitted targeting OS/2 to the masses was the big mistake, so now they will concentrate on the power systems… Also interesting was the report I read recently that Carl Sagan's libel suit against Apple was thrown out. Apparently Apple had used "Carl Sagan" for an…
>>gouging out letters… PMJI, Corey, but you are probably not doing anything "wrong". It is very difficult to do what you describe if you have a lot of characters. I have had some success using a grid, as Jack describes – I used something like a 10×6 grid to create…
Perhaps more useful than a sex stone.?
Aw, gee whiz, .., thanks! Maybe if everyone commented with their boolean tips, they could be compiled into a reference source, perhaps to help with the next 3DS manual (if appropriate!)
>>flashing or rendering shadows… This was in reference to your flashing shadow problem. I don't know if it will fix your specific problem, but it is a 3DS shadow tip that has been repeted several times on this forum. JKJ
Michelle, it's me again. Here is the old boolean message. JKJ [reply to an old message:] Hey Jim! Booleans & face problems, eh? My favorite subject… (the booleans, not the faces) I forgot whether your original message was simply about face problems or about completing booleans. As for tesselation, it…
Hi Michele, Boolean King? I hardly think so! However, since I do a lot of the mechanical things you refer to, I've done a big pile of booleans and have had to figure things out. 1> zits around holes… Almost always when I see the pinched look or smoothing prolems…
>>"old" and awestruct… That comment was prompted by a conversation I had with one of my sons a couple of years ago (he was about 10). I was gushing over with enthusiasm about some video or graphics magic and he was trying to be patient. He said something like "but…
I added a little 12v muffin fan (salvaged from old power supplies) for each of my Micropolis drives. I jam the wires into the 12v pins of one of the spare drive power cables and aim the fan directly at the drive. The drives go from frying-pan hot to near-ambient.…
>>equal intensity in all directions… Phil. You may be confusing light source intensity with the effect of the surface shading equations (for gouraud, phong, etc) which specify the intensity of the light "reflected" for each rendered pixel based on the angle between the light source and the surface, relative to…
Pardon me for restating what may be common practice for you, but don't forget to turn off the "Cast Shadows" attribute for large objects like ground planes and terrains that don't need to cast shadows. JKJ
>>we have watchers everywhere… Watchers, maybe, but no hats. (%> JKJ
>>You can apply separate mapping coordinates to faces — >>just select the faces and remap that way. PMJI, but don't you mean something like "detach the faces, join them to create elements, then apply separate mapping coordinates to the elements"? You can apply mapped materials on the face level but…
>>5 miles to school… ( Nah, we had buses even way back then 🙂 I guess I'm too old not to be awestruck every time I sit down in front of my monitor. >>free IPAS development kit for 3DS… I think you hit on a limitation of the plans to…
Hey Bob, I've been inquiring about these Glint cards also. My supplier reports that the Omnicomp people claim the ELSA will not work with 3DSM, while the ELSA people skirt the issue. How can one learn The Truth? The ELSA looked attractive to me since it has onboard VGA, while…
#185288-
#3DS Max and the R4 Blue
Message #185562
>>mixed feelings… Hey Lydell, I thought I'd respond since I initially had similar mixed feelings, especially about hardware that might be required. Then I started putting this hobby in perspective: My first computer in '76 was an 8-bit, 56K, 1 Mhz monster, hand soldered. Cost: about $8000. (The floppy drives…
>>bogus reflections… Todd, From looking at your REFLECT.PRJ file, it seems you have a version of the dreaded mirror-clipping problem. Even when splitting the wall object into separate planer objects to simplify things, I got a bogus reflection whenever a vertex from one wall intersected the plane of the mirror…
>>long-suffering sigh, pushing vertices… I thought you said you enjoyed modeling? When working with vertices, be sure to turn on Vertex Ticks in the Display/Geometry tree. Usually it's best to select and half of the faces of an object from, for example, the top view and hide them. Then select…
>>punching out the earth… Without seeing your mesh it is difficult to guess the problem, but if both meshes have topological integrity, the booleans should work fine. A few points to check for… Are the land-mass meshes completely "solid", i.e. back side faces with no holes? (booleans won't work consistently…
>>angled faces reflecting colors relative to the light… Andrew, While not specifically relative to a light source, you can easily change the face colors relative to the environment. I did this in about 3 minutes using a radial spectrum gradient (using the KPT gradient designer IPAS). Getting the right colors…
>>layered clouds… Jeff, Concerning Martin's advice about putting cloud bitmaps on cards and keyframing for motion, I recently did something similar. I simply used REFMAP.GIF (that came with 3DS) as an opacity map, set Diffuse=white and Self-illum=40. I rendered a camera moving thru and faded the whole thing out in…
Chase, >>modeling on a shoestring… As well-mentioned, you can model some amazing things using the deform/fit method. You might also try a shareware program called GIFDXF, which deforms a mesh by using the brightness values in a bitmap GIF file. This is approximately the same effect you can get with…
>>having Michelle… I'm jealous – all I got was your foot! Well that and some of the sure-to-be-classic tatoos. A great time was had by all. Ack, back to work now! JKJ
>>up to six audio tracks on Hi-8, vague camcorder manual… Tim, You may be referring to the "Multi-PCM" digital audio mode on some Sony machines. One of my Sony 8mm (not Hi-8) decks has the ability to record six independent stereo track pairs on a tape in an audio-only mode.…
>>FARO SpaceArm digitizer… JNJ, The digitizer works very well. I've been more than swamped the last few weeks, with not even enough time to get my modem software working again till just now. I completed four major animation projects in the last two months with several more waiting till I…
You ol' wish-grabber, you! Hope you hade a restful vacation. Did you happen to see Gus in scuba gear while you were out? JKJ
HOLD is my friend, too, but he starts getting on my nerves with 5-Meg files! >>offer improved depth perception… I agree. There is a lot that might be done to improve what I'd rather call "shape" or surface perception in 3DS. Besides the ultimate – stereo viewing while editing -…
>>Try turning on Display/Geometry/Backface on >>and the back faces won't be shown, so you won't >>make an accident. Good theory, DaviD of Paris – but unfortunately not a fact 🙁 Although Backface hides the faces, it does not hide the vertices. You can see this if you turn on VertexTicks.…
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