CompuServe Messages

<< I notice one of your chapters concerns the use of MetaBalls and Real 3D. Was I imagining things or did it say MetaReyes? (I'm at work and can't look at my downloads). Can you give me an idea just what you're talking about here? >> Briefly….one of the tedious things with metball modeling is getting all those spheres "strung together" so to speak, with the proper scaling & spacing to form (yes, once again) contour lines in the model. Using Snapshot in 3DS can help. In R3D, you can take a primitive sphere and a freeform open control curve as a path. Then you place that under what is called a Creation Method. With "normal" animation, the sphere will transverse the path over X keyframes. With Creation, a sphere is CREATED at every position for every keyframe along the path, producing a "string of beads" if you will. By varying the number of keyframes, you can have the spheres strung together with the spacing you desire. By varying the way the curve is evaluated over time, you get more control. By using more complex methods with multiple control curves, youi can create the string of spheres with control over total count, spacing & scale, etc.. Then export to 3DS. << One of my biggest wishes about MetaReyes (which I own — hell, I think I own every IPAS known to mankind) is to be able to use Deform/Fit and then somehow have the resultant mesh filled with MetaBalls. >> Well, there's a couple of other functions better suited precisely for that: Particle skeletons & particle volumes. You define an enclosed volume with conventional tools, then you can cause n by n particles (spheres in this case) to either "fill the volume", or to be snapped to the surface's CV's. Then export to 3DS. Regards, BILL