CompuServe Messages

#3DS File Format

    12-Aug-93 17:32:10
Sb: #3DS File Format
Fm: Greg Millbank 70713,3037
To: All
I don't know if my last effort got through. We are making 3D models of forested mountains for forestry visualization purposes, i.e. what will various kinds of cut-blocks and roads etc look like. To do this, we have to plant the 3D hills with hundreds of thousands of 3D trees of different species, sizes, and so forth, according to GIS maps of where everything grows. The trees are made of intersecting faces mapped with appropriate styles of branches etc. All this is done by a program which we wrote in C. The tree files are created as ASC files which we then feed to 3DStudio. The files are really big, at least 250 MB, and we would save a lot of space, hassle and time if we could make 3DS files instead. Does anyone know the format?? Any other ideas?