CompuServe Messages

Tim, The creases and folds can probably be removed by a dexterous use of Amplitude, Gamma, and Magnitude. With a little practice, you can start to get a pretty good feel for the types os settings to use. The drawback for me is that the click-on-the-radar-botton-drag-across-the-screen approach is not accurate enough, and manually entering values can be time-consuming. One of my requests to Hash was to have a highlight-a-control-point feature that would allow you to select a control point and have handles appear like in CorelDRAW! for adjusting curves. Of course, you would have to have handles appear in 3 different dimensions, but I think it would make precision modeling in AM a little easier. My idea for Hash's .DXF import may have been a little naive since I am not a programmer and do not really know for sure how surface area is calculated in either a polygon or spline system, but Hash's import seems to make a point-for-point transition. I have also found that even a moderately complex .DXF will have so many points in AM that working on it is "pointless"<g> There are so many points that there have been times when I've had to wait for more than 3 minutes just to redraw the screen. And the splines are peaks that cannot be changed to curves, so that in rendering, I CANNOT get rid of creases and the like. My idea was to calucate the surface area of the shape described by the polys, then calculate the same surface area to match the same shape in AM, but calculate it in a way that would use the fewest AM control points, of course, making any necessary adjustments to Amplitude, Gamma, and Magnitude during the conversion. Probably a too tall or even impossible order. I will have AM 3.0 in my hands sometime this week. I was told that Boolean CSG functions were being added to the modeler. Also, in case you didn't know, they also added a Phong and Gourand Shading option. These may only be options for test rendering the application of materials and actions. From what I understand, in the very early days of Playmation, you had a final rendered output option of Phong, Z Buffer, or Ray tracing, but later versions offered only Ray tracing. Maybe they revamped the old code and are giving you a choice again, I don't know for sure. There had been a lot of requests for some type of quick rendering for Character, Action, and Direction, so I don't know yet exactly how they have addressed that. I can make fairly good use of CAD apps, but Playmation was the 3D anim app that I bought, so I have never tried to do 3D anims with polygons. From what I've heard and read, most poly users would rather have a spline modeler, provided of course, that all of their others features were still available. I hear that 3D Studio users have let out a screech that is breaking windows at Autodesk for not getting a spline modeler in version 4. I was just curious about what you perceived as a drawback about splines in AM. As I said, tweaking some of your more complex shapes can be very time consuming, so I can see why you would want to stick to polys for detail work if you are already adept at it. As far as biomorphics with AM, or any other app for that matter, I think that Rod Havrick Altschul has set a standard to aspire to. I haven't seen everyone's organic rendering, and I haven't seen any of your work, but from what I have seen, even in the Mind's Eye series, Rod's organics are the best. (Of course, so far I have only seen Rod's head creations – I haven't seen him produce a complete figure yet, but it sure looks like he could do an awesome job.) If you are not upgrading to AM 3.0 for awhile, I'll let you know about the new features if you want. Michael S. Flynn