CompuServe Messages

Colin, >> Animatek's World Builder…. Would appreciate any comments about its usefulness and also importing its projects into 3d studio. << I have 0.9 and got fairly deeply into it for a commercial I'm working on. Eventually, I had to give up on it because, although, very nice for stills, it's still lacking some of the high-end features that I've come to expect in 3ds: fast, high quality anti-aliasing; the ability to animate everything; and generally the speed I have in 3ds versus a new product. I tried importing some of the trees for use in 3ds and used a couple of flowers, but many objects had normals flipped incorrectly which prevented proper smoothing. This caused too much work in the end. Some types of vegetation don't come into 3ds as you would expect and are converted into the nearest possible equivalent. Particle system grass which animates comes into 3ds as tex/opacity mapped faces (non-animated). For the most part I reverted to Schreiber Nursery; Yost's Silicon Garden, Scatter, fractilize, displace; and shaper/lofter modelling, to create the trees and plants I needed. I haven't given up on World Builder but am anxiously awaiting version 1.0 and then most of my advanced wishes will be incorporated into a promised NT version.