CompuServe Messages

..well, not quite. (WARNING: this message is one big spoiler! If you don't want to spoil the surprise when you receive Imagine, don't read this!) What I got was Imagine 2.9. Yep, Impulse has yet some more delivery problems. Not all bugs have been squashed, so they have released an interim version whimsically called "2.9 — in construction". There's no manual (that'll be included in the no-charge "real" 3.0 upgrade), but Mike Halvorson did include a 25-page description of the new features, written in Mike's inimitable style. Here's what DIDN'T make it: BONES KINEMATICS IMPROVED ANTI-ALIASING NEW LIGHT SOURCES WITH IMPROVED SHADOWS SHADOW MAPPING NEW STAGE & ANIMATION TOOLS And here's what DID make it: DETAIL —— -QUICK EDGES: Instead of a bounding box in Quickdraw, you pick some representative edges of your object. -MOUSE PERSPECTIVE VIEW CONTROL: Change alignment, zoom level and perspective level by moving the mouse. -ACTIVE PERSPECTIVE VIEW: Pick and edit anything by clicking on it in the Perspective view, just like the other 3 views. -LOAD/SAVE DXF: exchange AutoCAD objects with your friends. -OBJECT DEFORMATION TOOLS: Twist, shear, taper, pinch, bend, stretch. Numerical or mouse-interactive with live redraw. -LATTICIZE: Your object is turned into a latticework where only its edges will show; adjustable edge width. -APPLIQUE: You select an IFF map which will be wrapped around your object, and move its points in and out like an altitude map — except the points are _really_ displaced. Different from Lightwave since the displacement map is not separate from the object, i.e. you can't make the map travel across the length of your swimming shark. Imagine's implementation results in a single deformed object. -WAVE: Like the Ripple F/X, only in Detail. -CHECK OBJ: When importing an "Imagine format" object from a 3rd-party program, you can check its validity to make sure it's fully Imagine-legal. -STATES: A morphing tool, a superset of the Cycle editor. You create an object [ MORE ]