CompuServe Messages

John, Thanks for pointing out the camera rotation work around. I wrote the comparison late at night and left out many features from both programs. I stand by my statement referring to Lightwave's displacement mapping. To obtain anywhere near the quality of Lightwave's procedural displacement mapping would require a morph object for every frame. Obviously this becomes cumbersome. For the sake of discussion, I'll use the waving flag example. To get decent motion accuracy would take 20,000-30,000 polygons. For a five second animation you would end up with 3,000,000 polygons in your mesh. It would be very tedious to set up all of the morph targets as well. Plus I still don't think you could obtain the same level of accuracy. For all intents and purposes it is impossible. I know you can do a work around and make it less complex but at the expense of realism. About a year ago a major client called up needing an animation involving a waving flag. They needed it completed in less than 24 hours. This was a huge corporation with a massive AV department. They have more Tellys than I can count. Their animators, who exclusively use 3DS, were unable to complete it in however long they had to work on it. I did the entire animation in the 24 hours. Setting up the actual flag motion took about 2 minutes. All I had to do was click two buttons and enter the texture size. When they reviewed it they freaked. First of all they couldn't believe I had finished it in such a short amount of time, but more importantly they couldn't believe the quality. One guy thought I composited a real flag in. I didn't actually think it was that good. If I had more time I could have done a much better job. Using 3DS I would have had to take huge short cuts to get it done that quick. I doubt that they would have been impressed if I had used manta wave to create the motion. Setting up the 360 morphs with 11 million polygons wouldn't have worked. I think I have made my point. BTW, what was the last version of Lightwave you used? Chad Liddell PCAD*