CompuServe Messages

Hi All, A friend of mine recently picked up a Toaster 4000. He downloaded some Imagine objects from one of the local BBS's and asked me to drop by and convert some of them with Interchange+. When they were converted and test rendered he was a little disappointed with the results. I then showed him how to align and merge polygons, rename surfaces and apply textures. Within an hour we had his objects looking pretty good but he was a bit surprised about how much work is left to be done when Interchange gets finished. Now the fun part; He suggested that we should release a CD-ROM of PD objects that have been tweaked for use with LightWave. All of the objects would have descriptive surface names (no more "disk 37-light red") and would have polygons merged and aligned for quickest rendering. They would also contain all of the approprate (SP?) textures mapped properly. Complex objects would also come with a render of the object as well as the scene file used to generate the render. I addition to objects we'd also like the disc to contain LightWave related PD/Shareware programs. Things like Rend24, the Star creator, the Particle Fountain, ect. Brushmap collections, material collections, and interesting image sequences (eg. fire or rain) will also be on the disc if we can get any. As you can imagine, converting and texturing the objects will be a HUGE amount of work and it will be a little harder to get a free disc from us than it is from Syndesys with their 3D ROM. What we had in mind is something like this: If you submit a complex LightWave object with all of the texturing done and sensable surface names we send you a free disc. If you send us a LW object that need minor tweaking (less than 15 minutes) you get 50% off on the purchase of the disc. If you send us an Imagine object with a set of images to use as textures AND detailed instructions on where to map the images, AND the original object follows certain naming/grouping guidlines you'd get 25% off on the purchase of the disc. If you send us a simple Imagine object with no textures we'd probably just laugh at it and format the floppy it came on. ;^) In short, we want to release a disc of the highest quality LightWave objects we can, and the less work we have to do on your object the bigger discount you get. Discount percentages may change somewhat once we get a bit further into the planning, but we're shooting for $100 US for the final price of the disc. Any comments or suggestions? Jeff H…