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Organic figures in Infini-D can be hard to come by. The only programs I've ever had any moderate success with such models is using Lightwave's spline patches and especially Cinema 4D's hyper NURBS. As for Infini-D, you're better off with sticking to spline modelling, which is by far it's most powerful feature. The mesh editor, from my personal experience, is only good for such shapes as disfigured and randomized asteroids (refer here). I rarely ever use mesh modelling for my ship objects, as not only is it hard to get perfect results in, but you lose all your cross section and rail data that you get when your objects are in spline format.
Perhaps i will try to practice more with splines. But I've never like them on InfiniD, as I see them hard to manage. I loved Extreme3D way of making those kind of objects: you just draw plain figures on the 3D environment, place them on the corresponding situation (so you have an easy direct control over the final result), select them all in order, and apply a skin over them. That was easy.
With InfiniD, sometimes I've found with problems when trying to make the simmetric figures of those splines, as they tend to mess-up and appear like hollowed (I see the interior of the back surface instead of the front of the front surface) or not well mirrored.
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I don't know of many programs that allow you to select multiple objects at once. But if you simply mean you want other objects to move when you change the location of the parent, all you need to do is link your objects. Once this is done, you can change the size and location of your parent object, and all the objects which are linked to it will do the exact same thing.
Yes, that's what I usually do, and it is most of the times the most powerfull way. But, for example, on my last ship, I want to change the size of about 30 defense anti-fighter turrets without changing their position. Making then sons of a parent and scaling the parent doesn't work, as not only the turrets make bigger, but their relative distance to the parent as well. I've grouped them together directly using the Sequencer, and perhaps there is another linking method that allow me to do what I want. The problem is that linking manually the 30 turrets to a parent on my old slow PowerMac 6400/200 is a really slow job (even at wireframe with no antialiasing).
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I've had a good deal of success with symmetric figures in Infini-D. Although my Cargomaster wasn't symmetric once it was complete, I had to model those two cargo arms as symmetric objects. I always use cubes when I'm going to model something of this type - Infini-D gives you a lot more control.
So, how do you make a simmetric of a complex figure composed of many minor figures?
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I don't know how to make decent, animated explosians in Infini-D either, although I know how to implement good still shots. I normally simply add them via my background image (example), but Weepul recently showed me a technique of simply creating a cool explosian and texturing it onto a transparent cube (very similar to the technique I use for the engine flames). I suppose that if you had the time to edit the size and shape of the explosian texture for every animation frame, you might be able to pull it off. It'd certainly take a bundle of time however.
Mmmm, I will try that transparent cube technique... sounds cools, easy and with fairly great results, but, not better a sphere than a cube?
And about sizing it, well, it could result just making the transparent cube or sphere larger from one animation time to another (begining from the impact point), and applying a pseudo-random relly fast turn to it, so the explosion seems to be changing.
Now the problem is to find a good explosion image that fits well on a sphere...
Greetings:
Juan
(url="http://"http://warlockshipyard.iespana.es")Warlock Shipyards(/url)
