CompuServe Messages

George, I did't see Michael's message (I am using WinCis and sometimes I miss things and later it is too late <g>) I hope what I said about hash is somehow relevant to his concernes… As for Hash, it is a very powerful suite of programs that are especially well designed for "character" modeling, animating and rendering. It is available across platforms for Windows (with 2 rendering engines, one running in pure DOS for extra speed), Mac, PowerMac and SGI. (They started on Aminga but about a year ago stopt supporting it). Its renderer is based ray tracing technology only. There is so much to this program that I don't really know where to start — you would have to ask me some specific questions if you are interested. >>>how, for example, you can tell a sphere from a flat circle until it's rendered. You can't miss it, you see it as a wireframe in any of the set views (top, bottom left, right ect.) or any perspective you want… The surfaces can only "hang" on patches that have 3 or 4 points attached, so your sphere might look similar to other 3d wireframe models out there. (With much fewer control points — 8 "slices" horizontally and 8 sections verticaly will do). If you simply had a circle with 8 even sections, nothing would render (too many points), you would have to make 2 connections with extra splines going across (they would be straight since they would have only 2 control points). There is a bit more planing when working with splines. It is more similar to building real world wireframes for paper sculptures and takes some readjustmen if you are coming from the more traditional modeling background… Pawel