CompuServe Messages

The things about mapping that you mentioned are definitely problems. I really wish that there were a way to fix them, but due to a variety of problems, a universal "perfect" mapping plug-in just isn't possible. Inside 3D Studio, mapping coordinates are stored at the vertices. What this means is that every face in the object shares a location on the texture map with its neighbor. This is probably the biggest problem with the current mapping scheme. Some (most) objects are basically impossible to map without some mapping artifacts. It would seem that a good solution would be to allow every face to have its own mapping coordinates at the vertices, so every face can be independent of the other faces. In fact, it would be possible to work this. The problem is, if every face is given its own section on the map, it gets very difficult to edit texture maps in a 2D package. 3D paint packages would work great with this solution (given a few extra tweeks), but the resulting map file would be almost useless in 2D paint packages. This doesn't even begin to get into the filtering problems the renderer would face. Probably the best compromise is to allow texture "strips". This is similar to the above idea, but instead allocates a rectangular region in the texture map to a set of polygons on the object. It is much more difficult to solve distortion problems with this method, but it is probably the best compromise for now. So what's the final word? None of the above solutions can be implemented in R4, at least not directly. It is possible to do something similar to the strips solution, however. Just dice your object up and and apply the best mapping method to each segment. It's a painful way of applying mapping, but the results can look great! If anyone knows a better way, I would love to hear it. Hope this clears some things up, J.J.