nemyax

The Copy/Flip/Attach command is mirroring my half-model across the XZ plane instead of the YZ plane. How do I fix this? It doesn't happen for all models, but it does for this one. On a related note, is there a real instancing-based mirror mode? The face-icon mirror mode (although useful for gluing points to YZ) doesn't cut it, because it only mirrors transforms.

What kind of extension? Have you been making subdivision models and found Catmull-Clark wanting in the process?

It creates a standalone executable runtime from the Blender scene. A game, for all intents and purposes. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Game_Engine Yo Frankie! is the best example of what the engine is capable of.

Does it have to be an old program? One can use the "game engine" in the contemporary Blender to make interactive scenes.

Thanks! I'm finding that using keys and poses on the same transform channels produces funny results. The axes seem mixed up in the pose data. Nevertheless, A:M's ability to blend keys and multiple poses is quite ingenious. Looks like this system is unique.

After reading about poses in techref.pdf, I'm trying to set up a pose slider: Plop a cube into the choreography pane. Right-click the cube's bone, select New | Pose | Percentage. In the relationship pane, rotate the bone and scrub the slider to make sure it works. Back in the choreography pane, set keys on the pose channel. As a result, the pose slider value changes over time, but the cube isn't animated. What am I doing wrong?

Rodney Loath as I am to state a platitude, but future display tech will provide better resolution and faster processing than the current display tech. But you seem to imply there are going to be some qualitative changes.

It's not about display technology. You can't "directly" digitise something that's produced by a continuous function of your inputs. There'll always be some kind of sampling.

The need to quantize won't go away. And you will still have to derive the splines and surfaces from points and connectivity data.

What do you mean?

True. And it's fortunate this thread isn't descending into a splines-über-alles polygon-bashing smugness fest. Huh? You just split it. Leave the derived subdiv be.

It's right before his trip to Edna, when he discovers his old suit is damaged. We only get to see his hand fumbling inside the suit and coming out the hole.

I think I remember a shot where Bob puts on his super suit in The Incredibles. It's pretty brief though.

You do, because you don't model "before" you subdivide. You display your subdiv and your poly proxy simultaneously. By quality, do you mean resolution? A smooth model is not necessarily a good model. There are telltale signs of sloppiness whether you are working with splines or subdivs. A shoddy subdiv model looks shaved out of shape, and a shoddy spline model looks crumpled. It takes effort and skill to make the best use of your preferred choice of surface type. And the attainable resolution in real-time rendering hasn't really depended on the surface type all these years.

Precisely. And it's nothing new: RenderMan subdivision surfaces have been based on polygon-like primitives from day one. What's new is that today the subdivision can be hardware-accelerated thanks to shader-based tessellation. In fact, A:M's version of Coons patches can also be implemented with shaders, but no one has done it as yet. Correct me if I'm wrong, but all spline modelling and animation software has done patches in software so far, including the flagship, A:M. In this topic, HA:MR's ability to display patches is regarded as an enormous feat, but it really isn't. HA:MR does the same thing as A:M itself and a couple more (now deceased) programs, including the open-source Jpatch (in case anyone's after the sources of a complete implementation). If anyone is interested enough, they can go ahead and do a hardware-accelerated implementation in modern OpenGL (or D3D). That would really be a step forward. I don't know about this. I'm aware of two subdivision schemes: Catmull–Clark and Doo-Sabin. Neither is particularly concerned whether your primitives have three, four or twenty-nine points. They are general enough for all topologies. However, Catmull–Clark is notable in that, when done recursively (which it doesn't have to be, as demonstrated by Jos Stam), the very first iteration produces all quads, let alone the subsequent ones. Another very important reason is that quads go hand in hand with edge loops, which are an amazing surface flow control and mesh navigation tool. Edge loops are the bread and butter of subdivision modelling. In many situations, using a full crease in your SDS makes your points stay put. Admittedly, you have to be careful where you crease. I'll venture a guess. The industry will probably move further away from manual topology management into pure digital sculpting territory (think ZBrush). Geometry detail is no longer an issue, and enough is known about topology adaptation that most, if not all, of it can be done automatically. As regards rigging, I suppose we'll witness the emergence of several bone-and-muscle systems that are internally based on lightweight implicitly generated meshes.

Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. It's also a technique for smoothing out lightweight geometry, but there's an important difference: everyone already knows SDS, everyone already uses SDS, everyone already has tons of SDS-compatible models, and every software can produce them.

Yes there are. Notably, everything by Carmack up to and including id tech 4 (Doom 3). Ogre 3D is a well-known real-time rendering engine. If you mean smooth surface interpolation, I think we're going to see it in games thanks to Pixar's OpenSubdiv pretty soon. But if you specifically mean A:M's proprietary interpolation technique, it doesn't stand a chance.

Ah, but isn't that a reason to use an actual editor? You can't really get creative with a viewer. Good point. But that's best done with a game engine, so it might be loosely included in the games category.

By the way, what's the point of viewing 3D content that isn't a game, a rendering or a video?

Clara.io is an entire 3d modeller client implemented in raw WebGL. Why would anyone want a plug-in for 3D content browsing these days?

Can the mobile version be used on the desktop?

Will a dark theme be available?

Which SDK version is best for use with A:M V17? The FTP directory has V13 and V18 with nothing in-between. Is V13 suitable?

Apparently, OpenGL only these days.

Learning C++ by doing something useful instead of hello-worlds and something manageable instead of real programs =) Of course not! I'm a full-blown pathological dabbler.