CompuServe Messages

>>The plasticity of the Animation Master Sculpture module is very good, and I'm sorry to say I find the Shaper/Lofter process to be a real pain and a time waister I'll be interested in seeing how the splinepatch modeller works; for creating organic shapes I'll have to agree; 3ds isn't the best environment. A college in tech. pubs. have Animation Master; I may try seeing how it works for my next dragon head. >>day or two hacking up each dxf, then another day or two setting up heirarchies and naming slices Shouldn't take that long with a little practice; the cow (my first try) took about 3 hours start to finish. Since skin can use Catmull-Rom splines, which I believe are the same as those in Playmation, you should be able to get fairly close to your Playmation model by being careful in your grid placement and point placement. The best and quickest way to set up a animatable hierarchy would probably be to follow the example in Bill's branch example and the soldier/alien meshes (don't know the artist's name); build a substructure to attach everything to. For example, build a generic four legged sphere and cylinder skeleton. Save it. Merge a four legged animal mesh (sliced for skinning; I usually just skin by prefix, and am careful in my naming). Scale and place the skeleton segments in the correct positions (leg, chest, hips, head, tail segments, etc.; do this in the editor). Hide the animal and hierarchically link the skeletion in the keyframer. Unhide the animal, and link head slices to head skeleton, neck slices to neck skeleton, etc. That way they can easily animate the skeleton, and when the skeleton is hidden during rendering the skinned parts should follow along perfectly (if I made a mistake in my explanation, those who know more about this than me, please jump in and correct me). After your done with one, save it, reload your base skeleton, and go on to the next animal. Oh, and I did see someone in ANIVEND (may be mispelled) who was looking for Playmation/Animation Master dinosaurs; if that's not you, you may want to leave a note there, as this person seemed to be looking to buy. >>I was Moooooved by your Cow example Run and hide, incoming bad pun ;^)!!!!!!!!!!!! John Stetzer JWS