CompuServe Messages

I've noticed that a good many well-known IPAS routines actually don't do anything that you can't do without them — sometimes easier and better without them! One of these is still included with 3DSr"4" even though it became totally obsolete with 3DSr3, and others are being marketed by major IPAS distributors! VARY.SXP — totally useless, now that we have Material Morphing and separate Shininess and Specular Maps. Even in r2 you could do most of what VARY did by using animated maps. The main reason for VARY was that it could animate the shininess of an object in r2 so that you can have objects completely fade out including their specular highlights. But since r3 added Shininess Mapping, even THAT can now be handled by animated mapping! And what with Material Morph, you don't even have to resort to animated maps! Of course, Material Morph DOES require duplicating the objects that use it so that your vertex and face counts are increased, but the main cost here is in .3DS and .PRJ file size and some RAM usage. Since morph targets are usually Hidden, they don't directly take part in Renders and so shouldn't slow them down except by taking up memory and thus causing swapping to happen before it otherwise would. Still, though, I can't think of ANY effect that would REQUIRE VARY.SXP. Can you? All but one of Greg Pyros's TRANSITION IPAS routines (Page Flip, Rotate, Squash, and Quattro) can be easily done by mapping video or animations to screen-sized rectangles in 3DS and then animating the rectangles (or, in the case of Quattro, Instancing them — and unlike Quattro, you could also just have four rectangles each with a DIFFERENT video or animation on it!). Learning this technique gives you FAR more flexibility than these routines can give you! Only Swirl of that entire package does something that you couldn't EASILY do with this technique! And even it could be simulated by using a dense flat Grid instead of a rectangle and doing morphs with the morph targets being made by rotatiing interior vertices of the grid, but that's not what I call "easy." Swirl does therefore have its uses, but the rest of the package is worthless. Schrieber's PYTHON.PXP is probably the worst offender of the lot. It has been hyped many times here as being this great Must-Have solution for things such as animated signatures, liquid flowing through pipes, etc. But it only works on lofted objects and then only along the Loft Path. Well, you know what? So do Lofted Mapping Coordinates! A simple left/right black & white animated wipe .FLiC such as Animator Pro can easily spit out with its JOIN feature applied as an Opacity or Self-Illumination Map or any sort of Mask to a lofted object with lofted mapping can do ANY effect that I can imagine that PYTHON can do. And a lot cheaper, too — not just in terms of the cost of the IPAS itself, but in terms of scene complexity and rendering time! You see, PYTHON works by making morph targets with earlier targets having more and more of the vertices of the object "squashed back" along the Lofting path toward the beginning, so that as you Morph the object it seems to stretch out and appear following its lofting path. But a simple animated wipe Opacity map applied to an object lofted with Mapping Coordinates can do the same thing! Did you see the latest SIGgraph Demo Reel? Our animation with the Earth-like bowling ball in space used this technique to do the "World's Largest League" ribbon that appeared — yet I bet many of you thought it was done with PYTHON! And using maps can do things that PYTHON just can't do, such as having ribbon ends that are cut off at opposing angles (we just did THAT for the Louisiana Public Broadcasting's 20th Anniversary)! Can anyone describe an effect that PYTHON can do that animated maps could not? I've tried and I can't think of a single one. I think in all honesty that the Pyros Partnership and Schrieber (or Imagine or 4DVision or whatever they're calling themselves now) should either demonstrate uses for the products mentioned above that can't feasibly be done without them, or pull them from the market and offer a credit towards the purchase of any of their other products or packages to registered owners of the Transition Effects or Imagine Python, respectively. As for ADesk/Yost and VARY.SXP, well, that was just an example .SXP anyway that came with the program. Those of you who develop IPASes for a living, THINK before going through all the trouble of coding them: "Does this actually do something USEFUL that we CAN'T FEASIBLY DO without it?" I mean, the writer of Python went to a lot of trouble, and for what? All because s/he apparently forgot about lofted mapping coordinates! Anyone have any other candidates for my Useless IPASes list? 🙂