CompuServe Messages

Hi John, I recall picking up a kit for Specular's Animation Assistants on their AOL forum. Their included plug-ins include a banking one (roll varies with yaw), and two others I forget. From what I recall it was limited to motion… no geometry, camera, or compositing effects. Yikes on that R3D conversion to other formats… yes, what should be done with something like CSG? Many tools these days can do trim surfaces, but subtracting one shape from another while both are moving? That's Barfland for universal access. Nothing much has changed in the 3DGF format introduced with Macromedia Three-D in 1991. The format's still in the library over in MACROM… geometry-based derivative of RIB, as you know. Right now we're "between tools", and here are Macromedia's various native 3D formats: — 3DGF docs are there… Ray Dream, Working Knowledge picked up on that format, but few others… 3DGF has stuff in the Mac resource fork, so it's platform-dependent. — 3DWorks: Still (imho) a very nice text animation format… no specific docs on it, but easily doped out by inspection. — LifeForms is only licensed for distribution by Macromedia, and we don't own the source code so can't move forward on it. Puts out motion scripts in 3DW and Swivel Command Script format, as well as Electric Image 1.0 format, but its native file format isn't of much use to other applications. — The Swivel format is a snap, but it's of limited usefulness… pathform polygons, and limited to Macs. –The MacroModel reader files are still available through Rix Kramlich, 3D Product Manager. Geometry's described as spline pathform, Bezier patchmesh, and polymesh. Most apps can't display the first two, so polymesh would likely be the exchange format… that means few advantages over DXF. There will be some changes in the near future, but that's all I've got today! Regards, John Dowdell Macromedia Tech Support