CompuServe Messages

Danny – I wish this were true, however from my readings on meta-balls this has not been achieved although some hy-brid systems have been developed. The problem has to do with co-ordinates to map to. If the "blobs" as you put it are translated into polygons then of course you could, but this somewhat defeats the purpose. The other approach I've seen applied is Bezier Splines which can be texture mapped but there are problems with this too because the maps can't be applied across control points. DGS had the capability to create 3d Splines which are really neat but in the end after the modeling was complete the model had to be converted into polygons. But a significant advantage is that you can get fairly fluid forms by modeling this way. You can change the color of splines but only 1 color per model and if you map them, they will only map between control points. To create the Dinosaur in Jurassic park they used a hy-brid system which incorporated thousands of meta-balls to get the bumpy-texture and color. And even then you need a fairly sophisticated modeler to have the kind of control to produce the quality of models produced by Alias for instance. Pretty intensive computational stuff! Not real suited to the PC or even a cheapy SGI which is kind of a misnomer.<G> -JE