CompuServe Thread

Thanks a lot for the IPAS3 interactive description. PMJI to G. Teegarden's request/comments w/r/t fog: >>Actually Gary, what I mean is the ability for the fog to assume the colors of the backround. For instance, when we set up our scenes in LightWave, we create a gradient backround, and turn on Backdrop Fog. The fog then assumes it's colors It's a feature that as far as I know is unique to LightWave.. COMMENT: Topas does this as well. Also, you can define BG color first, but use a bitmap in the scene, and the BG color will still be used for the fog. In other words, e.g., you could have a sky BG bitmap, select/match color to the bitmap for defining your BG color, and the fog will appear to match your bitmap BG actually used in the scene. Did that make any sense ??<g> I'm amending this to the wishlist regarding this subject if this didn't occur "naturally". >>Another nice thing would be to have your gradient backround be based on a sort of world coordinate. In other words, suppose you have a gradient that goes from light at the top to dark at the bottom. Make it so that the when the camers looks up, the gradient is light, and when it looks down, it goes dark. COMMENT: I second that one big-time. I ran into that very need/problem fooling around with my fish.zip test anim.. Actually, now that I think about it, you could do this with a simple 3D procedural gradient mapped to a cube or whatever enclosing your scene. Thinking back further….I actually faked something similar to this in another program once by taking rectangles mapped with transparency and noise/turbulence-derived "fog", and simply stacking more or less rectangles near each other in the scene to fake the more/less density of the fog w/r/t world space….then I flew through it. This was a space scene, not an underwater scene, and I haven't tried it in 3DS before, but…….what's the difference ? <g>