CompuServe Messages

Thanks for the comments. We have been using release 3 for some time… Let me think of an example to illustrate my point… We recently had a client for our renderfarm service who had produced a complex building model. (he was an architect) and wanted it animating to video. – The model was an impressive, if complex, piece of work with much of the surface detail, such as stonework, steps, archways and pillars being fully modelled. The surface material was uniform sandstone-ish texture with a subtle combination of texture and bump maps. Faces ranged from little tiny ones to great big enormous ones, so face mapping was out. An .SXP would have been fine – but he hadn't chosen one… Time was against us, so we had to make do with planar mapping from the front…(otherwise we would have selected groups of faces pointing in each direction and mapped them separately). If we had had cubic (or box?) mapping, we could have applied a simple bump map to all sides of the building at once, very quickly, knowing we would have had a pretty reasonable result, whatever angle the model was viewed from. Think of staircases – how can you quickly map both the treads and the risers? (with stair carpet for example?) I know such a mapping mode would be really useful to us – of course I may just be really stupid and can't see a really obvious solution within the program as it is now…. Thanks for your help, regards Peter.