I was wonding if moving from Mechaninisto to Stratra 3D is the correct thing to do. I know how to work Mech, and have already created most of the ship in it. However, I still have about ten that still need to be done. How much better is Stratra? Is the quality better? Is it somewhat easy to learn?
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I don't know much about Strata 3D but I do know that you can make good stuff in both programs, its all how well you can use them.
One thing is that Strata has a Ray Tracing engine, Mechanisto only has a Phong shader. Therefore Strata has a much better rendering engine.
- Squinky
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Personally, I think Strata is far better then Mechanisto would ever be. As Squinky said, Strata has a somewhat advanced ray tracer, where as Mechanisto has a phong shader, which doesn't look terrible, but doesn't give your images the best appearance. In free software terms, Strata is as good as it gets (though I myself prefer 2D graphics).
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Hm. That's hard. I like mechanisto, some features of it are really nice. But strata is by and large better. Now if mechanisto was updated and given a good rendering engine. Ability to import and export models (with a few small work-around exceptions that don't work that well). Then I would love it (and heck, all the features Strata has that Mechanisto doesn't ;)). As it is... I say switch to Strata. It is more powerful than Mechanisto.
Side note: Does anybody know of free 3d programs for Linux apart from Blender? Oh well. Blender and the GIMP is good enough I guess :frown:.
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Diddly,
Recursive: adj. See Recursive
Try (url="http://"http://www.strata.com")www.strata.com,(/url) although they seem to have rearranged their site and you have to go through the 'links and contacts' section to get to the downloads. Nevermind, they seem to be getting ready for a new version sometime soonish.
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(This message has been edited by Sephyr (edited 06-05-2001).)
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Originally posted by diddlysquat:
**
Side note: Does anybody know of free 3d programs for Linux apart from Blender? Oh well. Blender and the GIMP is good enough I guess:frown:.
**
POVray (url="http://"http://www.povray.org/")http://www.povray.org/(/url) renders well, but no GUI modeler--must write text files. There exist GUI modelers for POVray available separately.
If you are not afraid of 
VTK (url="http://"http://www.kitware.com/vtk.html/")http://www.kitware.com/vtk.html/(/url) (atrocious frontpage website)
A year or 2 down the road:
Crystalspace (url="http://"http://crystal.linuxgames.com/")http://crystal.linuxgames.com/(/url) includes a capable rendering engine. Unfortunately, the developers want to clone quake. The rendering engine is wasted on quake.
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Quote
Originally posted by NNNormal:
**Is it possible to import Mech. documents into Strata.
**
No... Mechanisto can't export in any form, and no other program can read the Mechanisto files cause Mechanisto isn't programmed by a company... it's made by a dude, therefore, any compatabilitites with other programs are non-exsistent. I has a very poor working dfx importer, you'd need to go through and throughly edit the dfx mesh before it can read it and import it. It can import meshworks dfx meshes (after editing) and clayscape dfx meshes...
Strata 3D is WAYYY more powerful than Mechanisto. It's rendering engine is superior, it's textureing ability is superior, however, Mechanisto has better transformations and a better shader editor. I still like the simplicity of mechanisto over all of the other programs.
PEACE YO!
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