CompuServe Messages

Mitch, >> I am working on an animation of a printing press and plan to use Skin.axp for the paper running through the complex roller system. << Why skin? For your project, I'd probably not use skin at all. Mainly because I'd want a lot of control on the mapping. I suggest creating a path in the shaper that follows the route of the paper through the system. Then create a shape that represents the paper – a very thin rectangle. Loft the shape along the path and turn mapping on, normalize length on, length repeat (the total lenghth of the path divided by the length of a sheet of paper), perimater repeat 2. Then you'd just need to create an animated texture map of the paper in motion. You may need to fine tune the loft mapping co-ordinates. Also fine-tuning can be done on the material level, such as rotating, scaling, and UV co-ords of the texture map. I just tried the lofting technique with the 3d cel texmap, and it looks good to me. Sounds like a fun project. Good luck.