CompuServe Thread

Hi Jonas, About a year ago , I had an opportunity to purchase a "competitive" upgrade of Topas 5.1 because I owned a copy of 3DS. I've found it has some tools that would work great in 3DS. I work about 95% in 3DS & 5% in Topas and 3DS has it beat hands down. Here are some ideas though. 1) A much easier Match Perspective tool. In Topas you can build a simple bounding box around your model (which can be hidden or deleted later) & then you pick which planes of the box you want to use as control points, i.e. top & back, front & side, etc. 6 control points appear ( 1 at each corner) on the selected planes. You move these boxes to the perspective that you desire. After some calculations, the camera is moved to the desired position. In conjuction with being able to pick which camera to move , this would be a great tool. 2) Along with the last tool is an option called "Shadow Catchers". This is an attribute applied to a plane under your model that when rendered only shows shadows and the rest is clear. 3) A beveling tool with about 10 preset bevel types available to choose from. You pick the bevel you want and then control the amont of the bevel through a dialog box. There should also be a custom button to allow you to create your own bevels with lines and arcs. 4) The ability to place up to 250 decals onto a given mesh and be able to assign the priority to which maps so you could layer them as you see fit. The placement tool for this is rather unique. Your map of your decal comes up on your screen. Then a wire mesh of your model appears which you can manipulate in 3D, move , scale, etc. to determine the size and placement of your decal/map. This can also be used for bump,opacity,etc. 5) Spline editing of animation time lines. ( rotation,movement,etc.) 6) And last (FINALLY!(G) a spline modeler with at least 10 control points on the bounding lattice. I hope these give you guys some great ideas. You've got a fantastic product that just keeps getting better. Th nks, JC