CompuServe Messages

Hi Mark, PMJI – further to Kenvin's thoughts on explode and disintegrate: While it is true you can tesselate an object and get more complex explosion effects, you can also nest a series of dissimilar shapes and, based on the number tolerance, have a bizarre array of chunks o' thingies come flying out at moment of impact. In the Yost Explode, there are actually a number of very subtle adjustment parameters that enable you to achieve terrific deconstruction/construction effects, with bounce planes, decay, chaos etc. Actually, there is a demo explode .fli included with the disk that demonstrates a terrific explode with motion path, etc. The disintegrate routine actually places polyhydra along the wireframe and disperses them to a point of vanishing or appearing, and works very much like the explosion. All the routines on that disk are great fun, and work very well. My only complaint is that U/V maps, which control the color of the particle flow from SPURT and FIREWORKS do not take their time cue from START, but seem to rely on FRAME 0 always. That is a drag, because if I have an 800 frame run and want SPURT to start at frame 500 and run till frame 650, designing the U/V map is nightmarrish. Other than all that, I am really interested in taking a peak at Dynamic Motion Module or Key FActory. That could be very interesting.