CompuServe Messages

Judy, The 'smoothness' of the resultant mesh is determined not only by where you have positioned your reference spheres, but the level of detail you have set in the Mshape or Manim routines. If you have very few balls, then you'll get a mesh that looks like several spheres mushing together. To get forms that don't look like metaballs – which is the thing I think everyone out there is trying to do – I would dive right in to using the Snapshot command in the Keyframer to create your reference spheres. This way, you create your shapes by taking ONE sphere and moving or scaling it over time – then you create the snapshot objects and you're left with a very fluid form. The snapshot command is explained in full on pages 8-64 and 8-65 of your 3DS reference manual.