CompuServe Thread

Steve, (As I expected, WinCis dumped this message when I tried to create the new subject title, so here it is one more time under existing header. Sorry for that): I know you guys are working on future Animation:Master. I can only hope you will add some more modeling features this time around… Although the power of the program increased dramatically going from Playmation 1.48 to AnimationMaster 2.0x, disappointedly little has been changed in Sculpture… And there is a lot that could be improved in this heart of the program. You told me that you guys do listen to your users and get a lot of ideas and feedback from them… I hope others will jump in with other ideas but here are first three things I wish you could add to sculpture to make modeling even more powerful… 1) LATHE AROUND SPINE Imagine that you have a 10 point spline in a front view, similar to what is shown in tutorial for creating the vase…Click on a new icon (or select it from TOOLS) to create LATHE SPINE, a new, proposed function. What happens now is that you see a duplication of your original spline in different color. Each point in your original shape and the corresponding LATHE SPINE are "connected" (could be visual in different color <g>), and each LS control point becomes the "pivot" for latheing of the original points. Moving each point (on Lathe Spine) away from its original 3D position determines the direction and size of the lathe shape… After the job is done the Lathe Spine could simply disappear (or became a regular spine)… Just think about the possible uses for this kind of function! 2) MAKE LOOPED SPLINE Most of extruded or lathed objects have 4 point patches made of different splines. You can select any of those points and extrude them out… Your extruded shape is most likely be "squarish", since the basic shape for extrusion is made of disconnected pieces… If you could highlight the splines (holding shift key right now you can see only one spline-piece selected, this would have to be changed to so all are highlighted) than using Tools (or a new icon) LOOPED SPLINE function would disconnect the pieces from the original splines and connect them into new closed (or open depending on what has been selected and highlighted) spline… (OOPs! if it is not closed it cant be LOOPED <BG>. I hope you get the idea, though…) A shortcut sure to save a lot of time. 3) KEEP CONTROL POINTS DISTANCES I know Playmation came from Claymation and the surfaces are similar to those made from clay… the "control points" on the surface can get further or closer to each other with no problem… When you try to imitate things that are not made from clay — (most surfaces are more rigid than clay) in the real world they do not let you change "control points" distances — so you can spend a lot of time in A:M to make your models behave more realistically… For example, try to create TV commercial animation for a cosmetic company that want to advertise its new hair styling gel in a plastic, 8 oz tube, that will dance on the table… Easy? Not so. How will you project the image onto a shape that is round on the bottom and flat on top? None of the projection or decaling methods will be realistic, especially if the tube has to spin around, showing off its decal detail… (Right now it will take may hours to create a flat model of your tube onto which you can decal the image.. The key is preserving the distances between control points so you can rename and substitude the real round model for the flat one used for decaling). If the Sculpture had a function that allows you to keep the distance between points in a spline the job would be much easier: you would just create a cylinder… grab the top splines, make them rigid, scale them down along Z, which would automatically enlarge the X direction — the shorter the z the longer the x… It also would be great if you could go down to the bottom of the cylinder and select a spline that you would "lock" — all the splines on XZ directions between the top (which you will flaten) and the bottom would gradually go from one shape to the other… The channel function could determine how gradual the transition would be… The effect? You could quickly "flatten" your original shapes for decaling and not to worry that the image maps will get distorted — the control points you glue your stuff to will aways stay the same distance (or % specified variation, for less rigid surfaces) from each other… (It would be even better if the flatening function could be done directly in Decal without the need for substituting games). Pawel

How much does your software retail for? any thoughts on how the new revisions will affect the cost? Thanks for any info.