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Re: artists

Jan Ekholm wrote:

On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Eero Pajarre wrote:



The recent versions have additional capabilities like texture coordinate
editor, which enables moving each vertex separately on the texture surface.

(Assuming that the Linux version has similar features as the Windows one ..
(ducks))



Theoretically, they come out at the same time and with identical features.

Sometimes I have to remind Andy Colbourn (the 'AC' in AC3D) to push out a
Linux build of some beta versions.

One of the unfortunate trends in AC3D is that AC clearly sees the future
of the package as being for Windows - and some Window-esqe mis-features are
creeping into it.   One example being that models are now saved in a special
models directory rather in the current working directory.   For those of
us who are predominantly command-line users, that's a major pain in the
ass.   I have work-arounds for many of the new, dumb mis-features though.




Actually I have done my buildins programatically, but I do use the AC3D
format as my file format, so that I can quickly check how things look
like.



There is also a rudimentary (and poorly documented) plugin mechanism for
AC3D.




Maybe I should check out a newer version, my version is about a year old.



Yes - it's improved quite a bit over the most recent couple of versions.




I think the Linux/Windows versions have quite similar features. The Linux
version *may* come out later or be one revision after the Windows one, but
at the time I got my AC3D they were both on the same version and seemed to
have the same features.



Yes.

AC3D still has some major flaws that AC cannot readily fix - one is that Undo
was added as an afterthought - so new features that get added to AC3D frequently
mess it up,  Another very serious problem is that there are no per-vertex properties
like colour and texture coordinate - those are all stored at the polygon level.
Hence, you cannot arbitarily distort textures and you cannot have colour blends
across polygons.   You cannot extend his data structures - so there is still only
one texture map per polygon for example - and you cannot use a plugin to extend that.

What I have done is to use the texture map name as a 'surface property' name which
happens (coincidentally if you like) to match the name of the texture it uses. My
applications then use the texture map name to look up a full description of the
surface from a text file (which can include things like friction, detail texture,
vertex/fragment shaders).   This is a fairly workable solution.

You can also add per-object properties in the comment fields that AC3D provides -
although you have to beware that some AC3D operations take liberties with your
object that sometimes result in the destruction of carefully placed comments.

So AC3D is usable - but it has definite limits that can screw you up.




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---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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