CompuServe Messages

#Plant IPAS

    30-Aug-95 13:42:40
Sb: #188080-#Plant IPAS
Fm: MARTIN G FOSTER 70303,456
To: Mike Kelley 71302,73
Mike, you make some good points. I was looking at SG last night and I like the trees but they are limited by one important thing. They come out as 1 object and therefore have a 64k face limit – that doesn't go far with trees (correct me if I'm wrong). I thought about twiddling the SG .ls files that make the trees but I'd probably run up against that 64k limit pretty quickly. When exporting trees from WB it has the sense to break them up into sub-64k face pieces (GOOD), but the mapping and face normals on trees and flowers with actual petal/leaf geometry is all screwed up. Also the mapping on the trunks was fouled up. I had to to unify / flip normals and resmooth and sometimes mess with the materials/ re-apply mapping – I didn't count on doing this. Trees with texture/opacity leaf "cards" fare better (like the pine trees with needles), but I get better results changing from tiled material to decal on the pine trees. I need to be able to customize the trees in the library and I have asked for the source L-systems code for these trees – we'll see if I get it. Lack of alpha channel may be a problem too. I need to be able to 2d composite layers together with images from other programs and not having alpha is going to be a headache. Any idea of a workaround? Martin