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Subject: 
Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Mon, 22 Aug 2005 15:10:14 GMT
Viewed: 
1939 times
  
In lugnet.cad, Damien Guichard wrote:
Take a look at Maya and Lightwave.  The concepts have been all thought out
already.

www.alias.com/maya

http://www.newtek.com/lightwave

Can't have a look, would be too expensive for me.
May be the concepts in these sofware are fine for 3D artists, but nobody has
ever experienced and validated them for complete lego animation. Take "Revenge
of the Brick" as an example: it's more about adding some bricks in traditional
animation than adding some animation effects in a complete lego world.

The simple concepts are deceptive: the software components that implement them
are really difficult to develop, require software-engineering experts, and
finally have poor chances too seamlessly connect at the end of a long and
painful development cycle.

If you want an LDraw animation package, you are first going to have a willing
programmer TEAM.  That is right, animation applications take teams of people to
write them.  Several individuals (myself included) attempted to do various
things with LDraw and have not produced very much.  Look what has been done with
Lightwave, and they didn't need the LDraw library either.

http://www.daveschool.com/projects/BATMAN/assets/pages/index.html

It takes several tries before someone succeeds.
Will is a bad substitute for talent concentration.
You still think about a GUI tool, but a textual scripting language does not take
a team to develop.
As far as i know no LDraw team has succeeded either, so your argument ressembles
an open-source myth.

The success/failure criterium is not the individual vs. the collective, it's
about the concentrated vs. the diluted. I think only the concentrated side
stands a chance, the diluted side will ever be too divided (both in minds and in
geography).

Considerations,

- damien

Dear Damien,

I'm not 100% sure what you are saying for a lot of this post but I do have to
say that writing an animation scripting language, even utilising what else is
around, is a very difficult task.

As a simple example of how hard this problem is, lets say the only animation
allowed would be from sub-models with a defined connection to other sub-models
(perhaps through a meta-command). With one connection, the problem is
straightfoward, with two, a little more difficult, if we want five connections
though, we already have a difficult computational problem, even without a
physics engine. Once we throw in a physics engine it becomes even more
complicated.

I'm not saying it can't be done. Just that it is difficult. It obviously could
be written given enough time and energy. For me though, I do not have the free
time, nor the inclination to embark on such a large project. If you believe you
can do it on your own then go ahead and if it works effectively I'm sure people
will use it. I would be happy to volunteer mathematical 'expertise' to such a
project were it required.

Tim



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
 
(...) Yeah it's already difficult enough and i don't say i will try. And if i try i will not embark anyone as a collective project can have a negative impact when it fails: people who have invested time and effort want someone to be blamed and (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
 
(...) May be the concepts in these sofware are fine for 3D artists, but nobody has ever experienced and validated them for complete lego animation. Take "Revenge of the Brick" as an example: it's more about adding some bricks in traditionnal (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)

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