CompuServe Messages

Good point about adjacent objects that are the same distance from the camera. That may be able to be handled by referring to the bounding boxes in the .LOC files produced at render time (the same files that the now-defunct FLARE.IXP from Yost used), but that would only show the rectangular bounding boxes, not the actual boundaries of the objects (in your example, it would not work if the seam between the two boxes was at any angle on the screen other than straight horizontal or straight vertical). Still, though, that situation should be rare enough in generating cel-type animations. I assume the Z-buffer is 32-bit from the comment in the r"4" 3DS.SET file for the VPOST-ZBUFFER: ;Setting VPOST-ZBUFFER to YES causes a Z-buffer to be allocated and computed ; during rendering from Video Post. =At 4 bytes per pixel=, this buffer can be ; large; for example for a 640×480 image, the Z-buffer is 1.2 MB. This is ; needed by certain types of IPAS Plug-Ins. Default is NO. ;VPOST-ZBUFFER = YES 4 bytes per pixel = 32 bits per pixel. SEEZ.IXP (available in the AMMEDIA Library) extracts the Z-buffer from the Video Post [KF-Scene] item above it and replaces the image buffer with a version of the Z-buffer visualized as a grayscale image formed by truncating the 32-bit values to 16-bit values. When the bitmap is saved (assuming you Video Post rendered to disk) to any standard file format, the 16-bit image is either truncated or dithered down (depending on the DITHER TRUECOLOR setting) to an 8-bit grayscale image, which can then be fed to such programs as those nifty stereogram image makers. But the OUTLINE.IXP would have access to the full 32 bits, which means that adjacent objects would have to be REAL close together Z-wise in order to not be distinguishable from the .IXP Z-buffer. 32 bits means over 4 BILLION different possible values! About the only thing I can think of which would cause a problem here would be an assembled jigsaw puzzle viewed face-on when you wanted to outline each puzzle piece. For such cases, copying the objects in-place, then 3D-scaling the copies up from local axis VERY slightly, and linking these copies to their originals and AutoEdging them and assigning the copies a Wire material would do the outlining job nicely, but that's tedious and doesn't work as well for objects with more complicated geometry.