John Wright wrote; "once you start wanting to make arches or other curved surfaces the strength of a 3D modeling tool becomes essential."
I disagree with that, for situations where you want to do anything serious. For casual users, a modelling tool is fast and fun at the beginning. By the time they get to designing complex assemblages like buildings, the casual 3d Maxer will either have to spend all their time learning the fine idiosynchrosies of the tool, or start to learn some of the theory behind what the tool is doing and do it themselves, by hand. I've created a building complex myself, totally by hand coding everything, and because I've built up my own libraries over time, the process is pretty fast now. This is one of the rooms; http://www.worldwins.net/~peter/images/worldwins-sideview.jpg It actually takes longer to design a simple rectangular room by hand coding at first, than it does using a modeller. With a modeller, a couple of sweeps and clicks of the mouse and you're done. You could train a monkey to do it. By hand, you have to start thinking about whether to make your wall range from -0.5 to 0.5 (centered at the origin) , or to range from 0 to 1 (easier to type). You soon learn that it is easier to scale and translate an object centered at the origin, and other fundamentals. But what happens when you get into curved arches and texture maps and so on? If you still haven't bothered to learn anything about texture mapping or the math behind scaling and translation, you're still the trained monkey who has now learned to select a new drop down menu called 'arch library'. The further you get into really original design, or even really complex design, the more the automated tools will fight you. I can make that statement because I was the software developer who created new plugins for 3d Studio for the students and teachers to use at a film school. I used to watch students struggle to build vaulted cathedrals for their term projects, and spend all their time trying to 'fit' mouse-modelled pieces together, instead of spending just a little time finding out what a catenary curve is, and how to build a mesh with that knowledge. In the long run, for complex projects, building up a library of re-useable, handcoded objects and macros will be MUCH faster than using a modeller. You'll know what an iso-surface is, instead of just knowing where the 'blob menu' is. Peter K =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
