CompuServe Thread

Hi John, Thanks a million for the sample. Unfortunately, I got called away shortly after we last spoke and have not had a chance for communications efforts since….probably try it out Sunday. (now that I've forgotten everything that I was attempting to learn about CsNav in the first place <g>). Like I said, for some reason, even beyond lack of experience in that area, comm. s/w & h/w has always caused me to form a mental block….don't know why. …well, yes I do – cause it never works for me !!! I'll try to reciprocate with the following info FWIW: (excerpts from my replies in case you missed them) >>In addition to Greg's excellent suggestion for a visible grid-plane in viewports, … COMMENT: I've used both Alias & Lightwave in the past and I assume you are referring to the reference plane in this discussion…. For what it's worth, when I need a R/P in 3DS, I create a 2D grid using the GRIDS.pxp from the pull-down PXP loader menu, then place it at the world space origin (or wherever you might want it). You can define the grid size and density as well. Also can create/use a 3D grid when desireable. You can change it to another color other than object/path color(s) as well, as desired. It's actually an object of course, but……. >>Wow. Great fog suggestions. I hope we see those in R4! 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: 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>