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Thaellin · 10th June 2003, 09:50 AM

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

10th June 2003, 09:50 AM	#5
Thaellin Senior Member Professional user Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: British Columbia, Canada Posts: 255	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