#NEED ARTIST
Regarding the "cheap" route for the medical animation: You could get some clip
art on CDRom or shoot pages from a medical text. Then using
Tpaint/Dpaint/Brilliance/Adpro/Imagemaster/ImagFX cut out the organs you
wanted.
Then, use PixelPro to turn the shapes you cut out into 3-D "flats". That is,
flat disks with the shape of the "frontal projection" of the organs. Then store
the organ cut out in the paint/processing program as a brush. Now you can
texture map the brush to the shape in LW and use LW to move the organs around
as you need for the anim as long as you don't partially or fully "orbit" the
organ. You can use a combination of backgroun image and forground alpha to
place them behind ribs, other facia etc.
You can use this "cheat" to make it look really 3-D by moving things forware
and back on teh Z as long as the camera doesn't try to go around them or the
organs need to be rotated. Rendering times are real short for image mapped to
flats. If a little bit of side view is needed you can always curve the flats a
little without getting too much distortion in the picture to give it away.
It all depends on what kind of movement and how long the graphics are to be
displayed as to whether or not you can use this approach, but it is a good
compromise when money is the main constraint.
wmc – via Autopilot!