CompuServe Thread

Since you have Sculpt 3D, Animate 3D would be very usefull. It adds motion to your objects, as well as some other goodies. Since I do not have Animate at this time, I cannot comment any further. I do however have Silver. Silver lacks a fantastic object editor, but makes up for it in other areas. Currently, Silver 2.0 supports texture mapping and the use of Stencils. From your message I take it you know what Texture mapping is, so let shed some light on Stencils. Stencils are Images that contain "holes", areas with color register 0. When rendered in Silver, these pictures or images will be transparent wherever it has holes, letting you see through them. They also cast shadows. Silver 2.0 supports TRUE refraction of light, giving you true glass, water and crystal textures. Also, you can filter light through any object giving it a vaporous effect. Reflectivity as well as all object attributes can be varied on a scale of 0-255. If you want to enter text in any of these packages, you will have to create your own Library of 3D letters. Object Disk#1 from SYNDESIS already has a complete alphabet on it. With Silver though, you can have text appear on a Stencil, and manipulate it as a single 2D plane. Silvers animating capabilites are quite full in my opinion. It supprts hierarchical grouping and movement of single objects, or groups of objects. Camera motion is manually controlled, but can be targeted at any object automatically. Silver at this point supports over 16 million colors. It's RGBN format saves the image with 8bits for R,G & B components. In fact, when selecting a color for an object, Silver attempts to approximate each of the 16 mil colors by dithering. This is great, since the RGB sliders go from 0-255. At this time, SIlver does not support 68020 or '881. Such a version is in the works though. Silver's rendering time's are quite fast already, but such a version would bring long animations into reasonable rendering times. I can go on, but this message *was* supposed to be short! 🙂 As a closing, I'd recommend Silver, Animate/Sculpt & Videoscape 3D. There are times one is preferable over the other. At to the one I spend more time with, it would have to be Silver. And now that SYNDESIS will have a module to convert Sculpt Objects to Silver, I'll use it more! GreG P.S. Take a look at WHIM.ARC in DL6 to see Silver's Texture mapping capability. $