CompuServe Thread

Actually, when it comes to Yost Group IPAS stuff, I've got absolutely no problem talking about it before it's released. I'm not a publicly held corporation, and nobody really cares what I say about my own software. That said, there are going to be two new collections of IPAS3 routines from us in April… One from Darrel & Jeff Anderson and the other from Rolf Berteig. Here's a synopsis: D&J's disk: SCATTER.PXP: Particle system arraying tool. Uses a distribution object for the arraying surface and source objects (or object groups). Example… you've got a head and you want hair growing out of it. Use the head as your distribution object and a strand of hair as the source object. Apply random rotation, scaling and chaos to the hair, and scatter will make as many copies as you want, aligning the hair to the normal of the head surface. Another example would be aligning trees, cows, houses, or whatever to a topo surface. Great for fields of things, like grass, etc. Of course, like all of our IPAS3 routines, you actually see all your objects inside the routine's dialog and can do real-time previews of the effect, rotate around the objects, etc before you actually commit to it. DEFORM.PXP: Free-form deformation tool… builds a lattice, lets you deform it, then deforms the object, etc. Has a few IPAS3 niceties that let you do some unusual things for FFD's. VAPOR.AXP: All-purpose particle system smoke, gas, steam, etc. Very very sensual. FIRE.AXP: Real 3D particle fire. A few other SURPRISE axp's… Rolf's disk: SPATH.KXP: This is a 150K+ application… the largest IPAS routine we've ever done. It's primary purpose is to allow easy velocity curve editing for position and rotation keys. Draw bezier splines for the velocity over any number of frames and it applies that curve precisely. Includes a velocity curve librarian so you can store an infinite number of curves with each object. Of course, it lets you do REAL-TIME (precise real-time) previews of motion before actually applying anything. You can use inches/feet/miles and seconds/minutes/hours as units, so it's good for forensic work. It also does automatic key reduction. Plus, it has a huge path fractalizing subsystem so you can apply fractal motion to the position or rotation tracks. There are also simple macros for things like constant accelleration and constant velocity. KEYMAN.KXP: This is a keyframe librarian. Basically, it lets you store an infinite number of named 3DS keyframe sequences inside of any object, so you can play with different timings and things and not have to worry about redoing anything or losing anything. This'll be especially valuable once other KXP's come out that do procedural motion, such as Positron's dynamics package that'll be coming out this summer. Run a simulation, save the keys, and then run another simulation. Then, without having to re-simulate, just re-load the last simulation's keys. Keyman.kxp also does adaptive key reduction, just like spath. DIPLACE.PXP: This is the displacment modeling tool that I mentioned earlier. It's a highly-interactive application that lets you load bitmaps for displacement or has a built-in fractal subsystem if you just want to do fractal surface perturbations. Once you load a bitmap, you can visualize the displacement in real time as you move the mapping icon over the surface of the object. LOTS of options here for effects, and it even does adaptive tessellation and object simplification. SIMPLIFY.PXP: If you _just_ want to do object simplification, this routine lets you pump an object in, and get a lossy or loss-less simpler object out. There ya go,