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Syndesis Corporation makes InterChange Plus, a system of translators for many 3D modeling formats such as DXF, 3D Studio, Wavefront, LightWave, Imagine, Sculpt, and many others. We're the "Hijaak" of 3D translations. InterChange Plus is available on the Amiga now; we hope to be shipping the Windows version later this year. As a demonstration of our translation tools, we're producing a CDROM called the "Syndesis 3D-ROM". It will be ready at the end of this month. It is a collection of more than 500 3D models, all translated to several of the formats we support, such as DXF and 3D Studio. We've got most of the data ready for the first volume, but we want to explore supporting POV and Vivid for future discs. Our translator's internal database keeps a hierarchy of sub-objects (parent-child, brother-sister, etc.) Each sub-object is composed of polygons. (They could be triangles or more complex polygons; we have subroutines to reduce to triangles.) Each polygon indexes into a table of surfaces, each surface includes a name, a color, a reflected color, a transmitted (filter) color, a specular color, a Kd diffuse coefficient for ambient color, glossiness for shininess, a Ks specularity coefficient, a refraction index, bits for luminous, wireframe and smooth settings. Each sub-object has a name, too. I'd like to start a thread to discuss how we might best translate our internal database to POV and Vivid formats. Read action !