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Old 4th June 2003, 04:41 AM   #1
Andy
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Default previous suggestions

AC3D is used for a wide variety of purposes - what would you like to see added?
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Old 4th June 2003, 09:42 PM   #2
RossageSausage
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Default Suggestions

First of all...wonderful product...best model maker I have used.

Some suggestions:

1. Animation: THIS WOULD BE THE ICING ON THE CAKE, due to the fact that ac3d is the easiest modeler to use, if you added animation support I would be the happiest person on the planet. Plus you guys obviously know how to make a user-friendly program so I bet you could make awesome, easy-to-use animation tools.

2. TextureCoordinator: When you zoom in you can only zoom in on the middle of the texture, when I zoom in I'd like to be able to zoom in on any portion of the texture

3. Lighting: As of now you can only add white lights to your object...multicolored would help quite a bit

Thats all I got for now.....I hope that you get this (LETS GET THIS FORUM GOING)!!!!!

Maybe to help you should make this forum available to the public........I have lots of people who inquire about the program who would benifit from open discussion

My Two Cents

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Old 5th June 2003, 07:25 PM   #3
dasteph
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Hi all,

I've been using AC3D for about 8 months and am well pleased with it, great work all round thanks for this great modeller. Now to the requests / suggestions ...

1) Cameras would be great: I'm using AC3D to make complex scenes and the ability to have a number of cameras would be an immense help.
2) Lights: If not extra types, at least the ability to change the values of point lights within AC3D.
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Old 8th June 2003, 03:52 PM   #4
Mega Man
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Default Flipping and Normals

I purchased AC3D a while ago. I'm one of those people who buy software and almost never use it. But I recently started using AC3D and I was shocked at how incredible it was. But the one problem I have is the flipping of objects. I'm making levels for games and it slows down the process when I have to make sure every normal is pointing in the right direction when I duplicate and flip objects. I was hoping you could include the option to automatically flip normals when flipping objects. Thanks for the software.
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Old 10th June 2003, 09:50 AM   #5
Thaellin
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Default Further Suggestions...

There are a few things I've started noticing recently that seem to be missing...

1. The ability to mirror an object across an arbitrary (or just axis-aligned) plane. I've been creating a fairly complex land rover ( > 40,000 triangles) which is perfectly symmetrical (at the moment at least). If I were able to create just half of it, then mirror it and weld the halves together, I could save some processing power. Andy, you mentioned you had used GMax for some 3ds testing - look into the mirror options for 'copy' and 'reference'.

2. Processing power brings up another point... Right now, in that model above, if I accidentally switch to vertex selection mode while I have the whole model selected... well... I might as well go get a bite to eat. This is a 1GHz Athlon with 256MB of memory and a Radeon9000 under Linux. The 3D itself can be manipulated at good speed, but many AC3D operations (particularly when it has to touch a lot of elements) perform slowly.

3. Multi-texturing. Ideally, this would allow an arbitrary number of textures to be applied to a model with user-defined application modes. I'd really like to apply a bump map in addition to my detail map from within the modeller.

4. In the AC3D file format, I think a 'user' object would be beneficial - this would be ignored by the core AC3D program, but would be preserved in all file operations. Any number of user objects might be present in a file, each with a name, location, arbitrary ascii lines, and kid count. This would be used to allow plug-ins to extend the file capabilities without breaking AC3D compatibility. The current User Data field is not quite flexible enough.

Out of the predefined options, I really do want 'animation' most. I've already voted up there...

I'll go do some work, now.
-- Jeff
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Old 10th June 2003, 04:30 PM   #6
Balrog
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Default Improvements

In an older version of Corel Draw they included a 3D modeler, but it was almost impossible to use and understand. Your program actually gives me hope of being able to create some 3D images, and maybe halfway know what I am doing :wink:

One thing that I would like to see is more light features, colored lighing, directional, etc..
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Old 11th June 2003, 09:33 AM   #7
Bob Pieterson
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I keep forgetting the grid settings I was working with the last time I worked on a model. And the placement of the background pictures I use.

So my wish is:
A project settings file of some sort on top of the model file. The default settings when opening a new project is also a project settings file.

Am I going off the scale? Or did I overlook something that was always there.

Greetings
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Old 16th June 2003, 12:41 PM   #8
Thaellin
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Default Re: POLL - VOTE NOW

I never seem to be done suggesting changes to this program 8P

I think DDS texture file format support would be nice. The format is designed to provide precalulated mipmap support, bump and color textures, and (most importantly) compressed texture formats.

The data for each mip level can be compressed in a way that modern hardware understands - so you can upload a complete 1024x1024 texture and mip levels in a little over 1MB of data.

Information about the file format can be found on Microsoft's site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...fileformat.asp). Yes, OpenGL does support this through extensions (on every card I know of from Voodoo5 upwards... a fairly exhaustive support list can be found at http://www.delphi3d.net/hardware/ext...re_compression).

Have fun,
-- Jeff
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Old 18th June 2003, 10:39 PM   #9
SumGuy
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Default Re: POLL - VOTE NOW

AC3D is a great program. I love it because its so easy to use. Im not really artistic, but I can do pretty nice things with AC3D. It would be my favorite 3d program, but THERE IS NO ANIMATION!!! It would be perfect if it had an easy-to-use animation system.

I would also like to be able to export MD2 files. Im learning how to program with OpenGL, and MD2 is the only kind of file I currently know how to use in my programs! Plus its a pretty popular format.

But, above all else, AC3D NEEDS AN ANIMATION SYSTEM!
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Old 19th June 2003, 05:26 PM   #10
searlejr
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Default Re: POLL - VOTE NOW

I use AC3D mostly for education in the basics of building low-poly models for real-time application use. So to that end what would be useful are:

1. More sophisticated model hierarchy manipulation tools (grouping, ungrouping, reordering, etc)

2. More sophisticated Texture Coordinate Editor (although adding the first version of the TCE in at all has been a HUGE boon for us... and our students).

3. Multiple textures per object (without needing to break geometry into separate sub-objects). Detail/Decal/Sub-face type textures would be particularly nice.

4. An OpenFlight importer and exporter would be the final icing on the cake, in our market area, but I appreciate that's probably a bit too niche/specialist.


For me, AC3D's great strength has always been as a specialist modeller and that's what I'd like to see further developed and enhanced, rather than putting effort into attempting to add-in animation capabilities.

Jonathan
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