Bones and morphs were written by Eovia. . . they hold the source, so they can do what they want. ;-) Not exposed to us plugin guys is what I meant. Maybe there is another way around it? Yeah, Agrooves works somewhat- it doesn't give you quite the degree of control and simplicity that the greeble plugin does- mostly in the iterative nature of greeble. If you had it in the VM, it would be easy to create shading domains as you go, so that streets, walls, roofs, etc were all shaded differently. Markd

A roadblock to a simple greeble plug is that it is not possible at this time to add plugins to the VM. . . I suppose it could be done as a new modelling room, but that seems like a lot of work. Markd

Do you know to any more detail what CPU is in there? You might need to check at boot time to get the full description- ie, are they Athlons? Durons? Same generation? Tbirds? Bartons? Just guessing here. ;-) Markd

Hi Kix- Do all the machines have the same CPU? I wonder if a difference in floating point units might cause a difference in rounding. . . Markd

Attached Link: http://www.des-web.net/html/shoestring_shaders.html

And a couple of new samples- one for fresnel, and one showing another translucency application. http://www.des-web.net/html/samples.html Markd

The Mac version is available! Time to work that credit card! ;-) Markd

The SDK is traditionally released just after the program is. . . it will take me a little while to get it ported, maybe a week or two after all the pieces are available? Usually it is just a quick re-compile, sometimes there are a couple of issues to work through. As far as I know, there aren't any major changes to the shader area, so it should be pretty quick. Markd

I aim to please! Besides, I want to try and get people to buy in early. .. I'll try and do some more images next week (assuming you have already looked at the samples) - I'm out of town this weekend. I have to warn you that I'm more of a tool maker than an artist. . . ;-) Markd

I could NOT stay awake through that movie. ;-)

Thanks for the numbers. They are about as striking as I would expect! Markd

Nice!! Can you run one with the full geometry, and one with the face on a plane, and tell us what the render times are like? There should be a significant advantage. . . Markd

Awesome wispy clouds! Can it generate a nice puffy-looking cloud? Like a thunderhead? Markd

I'm currently working on some new tweeners that I think will be pretty useful- one is called Dynamic Repeat. It lets you specify a section of the timeline (containing an arbitrary number of other keyframes and tweeners) and repeat it a settable number of times, with an option to retain the original timing, or to compress (or stretch) the number of cycles to fit into the new section being tweened... dang, that sounds complicated. . . here is what the interface looks like. . . the real beauty is that you can then go back and tweak the original sequence, and your changes are reflected down through the rest of your animation. . .

There is also a Scaler that takes a sub-tweener and multiplies it (gets around those annoying rep limits) and a Limiter which is designed to align actions. I hope to get these out in the near future. Any interest??

Markd

Message edited on: 09/09/2004 19:18

Plunge away. Unless there is a radical departure from the past, porting is pretty quick and easy. Not only the experience will carry over, the code will too. I was told that it is not ready yet, and that they are working on it as fast as they can. No date given. Regardless, you have at least a month, as the SDK does you no good at all until you have the program. ;-) Also, if you plan on supporting CS3, you will need to work to that SDK as well (you need to do each version as a separate compile). Markd