CompuServe Messages

> Does that mean that you will be one of the special few who will keep upgrading their IPAS programs? Yes. We have a long list of future features and enhancements. We have one upgrade planned for January 1995 already. >What about horizontal impact and rebound, like two cars running into each other. Is this motion covered and controllable? You can use DMM for simulating those types of motions, but there are some missing variables. Because the intitial version doesn't include friction, the resulting response will not be as accurate as it could be. Also, DMM does not perform the object deformation, so even though the collision response would look very close to what actually would happen with the set speeds, the vehicles would look the same after the collision as they did before. After the motion files were generated, you could probably set up an object morph in 3DS to do the crunching at the right time. Accident reconstruction is one area that DMM will continually improve as new versions become available. There are so many factors though, that it is a very difficult procedure. Consider the make up of the pavement, the weather conditions (rain, snow), sand on the road, skidding and so on. DMM is now best used as a replacement to the chalkboard or storyboard. It is a reasonably close approximation of the events >Also, can a motion be calculated in reverse, so that an object can suddenly explode without a slow in motion. I'm not sure how you could do it so it explodes and then slams into other things, gets more spin and careens away. You know—action stuff! I'll have to check on the motion in reverse thing. With our LightWave version, we included a macro that would chop an object into a user defineable number of pieces, save them as individual objects, and place them so that they were all pasted back together. Then in DMM, you could smack the objects from behind with a non-rendered sphere. Not only do the pieces go flying, they collide with other pieces as a result. We have discussed adding a similar routine to the IPAS DMM, but as of yet haven't done so. Brent