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Old 4th November 2003, 01:54 PM   #7
Kwizatz
Junior Member
Junior member
 
Join Date: Oct 2003
Location: Costa Rica
Posts: 3
Default Re: So, if I was to...

Hello guys,

Sorry for the delay, to be honest I kind of felt like the thread was dead, and stopped checking it :? , but I can see there is some interest on this.

Today I got an email from Andy about the upgrade, so I was reminded about this thread, so I came back to check, I have recently bought caligari's new gameSpace package, and I've been writting a Geosphere primitive plugin for it, now I am thinking about an AC3D version.

but I digress, Andy, thanks for your reply, and for letting me know you are ok with using the SDK for profit, I am like you were too one day trying to start to make a living out of my code by myself

Regarding the old plugins:

The Object Recentre was a simple interface that allowed you to set the center of any object to an arbitrary point, so you could later use the center as a pivot point, which is really what the center is... kind of.

The Object Set Parent plugin allowed you to set the parent of an object to be whatever other object, so you could for instance set "Hip" to be the parent of "RLeg" "LLeg",

These helped when exporting to PovRay, since the povray exporter I wrote would use the pivot point and the hierarchy to set the imaginary bones, in effect, the "hand" object would be rotated X,Y,Z around the center/pivot point and then rotated by the X,Y,Z of the "Arm", which was its parent, So basically it multiplied each Object's matrix to form anymation keyframes in PovRay, you had to do most of the actual animation work manually inside PovRay.

I hope I was not confusing there, and if I was, let me know and I will gladly expand on the explanation, I am always eager to help.

Like I said, the code for the plugins is gone my old site went down about a year ago, my hard drive crashed not more than a year ago, and I had no backup, I have learned my lesson tho.
Andy, I asked you for the exporting to PovRay Code, which you kindly provided me with, I did sent you back the changed code, unless you never got my emails, if you do keep a record of your received email, I am sure the code is there, if you find it please feel free to incorporate it into AC3D, I dont want to brag or anything but my code did improved a bit the resulting .pov file. 8)

Regarding the "Would be" animation suite:

Yes changes on the file format would be needed and made, which is why I was thinking about doing an extended ac3d file spec based on the current one, and the Animation enabled files would have to be saved and loaded thru an export/import plugin, and so exporters for animated files such as MD2 would have to be created that make use of the new features, the plugin itself should have exported functions, and a small SDK of its own to allow people to write their own "animated" exporters.

So you guys see, its not a small task

Cheers!

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