CompuServe Messages

I still think that a lot of people are still missing the point with Skin & Slice. Except for situations requiring avoiding morphing, such as skeletonal control in the Keyframer, you don't need to slice a mesh. You can use rotations, transformations, F/F Deformations, etc. along with vertex-level editing for the morphing. If your pre-built object is not constructed with the proper techniques producing interpretable vertex ordering for Skin.axp, Slice probably isn't going to help you. The hull is the lattice for the B-Spline surface. Specifically in this context, it's the actual polygonal mesh in 3DS…. But you have to look at it differently. If you want a smooth cylinder for instance, you just construct an enlongated cube, and let Skin worry about the curved surface. Apply this concept to more complex geometry. Create a circle in the Shaper with a step level of 5-10. Now reduce the steps to 0. What do you end up with ? Think about that when constructing your hulls. Another 3D/CAD program is likely to produce Skinnable entities if it makes sense. That is, you're not going to have success if you try to import say trimmed surfaces, boolean operated-on objects, digitized objects, etc.. But if you have objects which were created with a grid-like U&V structure, then it's entirely possible that the vertex ordering may be useable by Skin.axp. And last & as I said before, if you think about it for a while you'll see that there are many ways to use problem objects as references for quickly constructing native 3DS geometry for the B-Spline hulls. This can be as simple as just using 3D-Display as an aid,…. to literally slicing up (not the PXP) the mesh and deforming pre-built cross-sections to match. (see my other message in this section) BILL