>> OK, well... In level one, where you meet Barney and he walks past the 
>> light fitting, why does the shading follow the polygons in the 
>> character mesh?
> 
> I dunno. Crappy graphics card/driver? Crappy settings? Optical illusion? 
> You imagining things because per-pixel lighting is "clearly impossible"?

When did I say *that* was impossible? It shouldn't be; I see no 
particular problem with doing it. I just pointed out that when I played 
HL2, it didn't. (Or didn't appear to.)

>> Maybe it'll draw a perfect circle or even an ellipse for you. But this 
>> is neither. It's more of a "stadium" shape, following the contours of 
>> the human hips.
> 
> So tweak it a little.

IME, if you take a perfect circle and tweak it, the bits you've touched 
now look horribly amaturish and wonky next to the perfect untouched 
parts. I've wasted hours trying to force points into a smooth-looking 
curve. As far as I can tell, it's impossible.

>> Sure. Drawing hundreds of polygons with perfectly parallel surfaces is 
>> drop-dead easy.
>>
>> If they're aligned to the coordinate axies. :-P
> 
> Clearly you have not actually used any half-decent modeling software.

I don't know - what counts as "half-decent"?

Back in the Amiga days, AmigaFormat gave away several coverdisks 
featuring demo versions of what were supposedly "cutting-edge" 3D 
applications - Expert 4D Jr, Imagine 3D, Real 3D, Cinema 4D, etc. Hell, 
I even once borrowed an illegal copy of 3D Studio Max.

Real3D was nice in that it deals with *real* curved surfaces, rather 
like POV-Ray, so spheres actually look spherical and so forth. The rest 
are all just mesh editors, with all the limitations that implies. In 
particular, all of them have options to generate a sphere, cone, torus 
or whatever with X number of polygons. But once you've created the mesh, 
you can't really *do* anything with it, except move the individual 
verticies around, one at a time. (This is _not_ my idea of a fun time.)

Imagine 3D had a nice tool. I forget what it was called, but it gives 
you three views, and you edit control points rather than the actual 
polygons. The top view is the cross-section shape, and the other two 
views are the path this is swept along. The tutorials show you how to 
make a banana. (Helpfully, the real-world banan actually has a slightly 
polygonal cross-section anyway.)

Could I get the damned thing to look like a banana? Not one bit of it. I 
mean, I could make it look like a very blocky child's diagram of a 
banana, but nothing anywhere approximating a real banana. It's just too 
hard to line up dozens of points in a flowing curve. I spent weeks and 
weeks trying.

As for 3D Studio Max... It has *a lot* of material properties you can 
play with. I can see how that could be quite useful. But as far as mesh 
editing goes, as far as I can tell it's even more limited than most such 
editors. (Mind you, this was around 1992 or something. Maybe they've 
fixed that by now...)

>> I mean "impossible" in the same sense that it's "impossible" to throw 
>> a dart at dart board and hit a particular atom with the point.
> 
> Yet you keep using it when referring to things that are almost trivially 
> easy.

IME, with mesh moddelling *nothing* is trivial or easy. (Well, except 
selecting "torus" and then "create mesh". That's trivial.) Every mesh 
editor I've ever seen makes it utterly painful to achieve even the most 
seemingly simple task.

But then again, mesh modelling by definition involves attempting to 
create the illusion of complex surfaces by simply throwing hundreds of 
trillions of data points at the problem rather than using some more 
sophisticated approach. What do you expect?

Post a reply to this message