History Reminder

As we consider the plight of the planet, it is good to look back and remind ourselves what the earth used to look like and how it got this way.

Precambrian Era

In the beginning, say 2-3 billion – with a B – years ago, the earth was covered with a reducing atmosphere. No free oxygen was present. Only carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. Oxygen is very toxic and very reactive and so it reacted with the hydrogen and methane and sulfur and iron, and it was all bound up in the products of the reactions – Water, Carbon Dioxide, Sulfur Dioxide, and Rust.

When life first evolved, it comprised various species of bacteria that fed on this atmosphere and probably the likes of the deep ocean vents, both in the ocean and in shallow pools on the surface. In places there was a meager living to be had from finding “Resources” in the form of un-reacted chemicals and further reducing those chemicals to the ones mentioned above. This state of affairs in the history of life went on for untold millennia with no real change, no higher life forms, no plants and no real fossils except for the mats of bacteria that were left, mineralized, in shallow waters that we find as the only fossils from this period.

Precambrian Era Timeline

But then there was a technological break-through in evolution. Some cells invented photosynthesis. They figured out how to use the light of the sun and carbon dioxide to make food at first, and later structural materials in the form of cellulose to build their bodies. This was a major break-through since the power of the sun, and the availability of carbon dioxide was apparently limitless. And the explosion of these algae and later the other plants, still in the oceans and shallow waters transformed the earth. Well that’s not the way they saw it. From their point of view there was a toxic crisis. Photosynthesis produces oxygen, and at first this was simply reacted in the atmosphere with the residual hydrogen and methane and all was well, but eventually more oxygen was produced than could be reacted away and it began to build up. Early plants were not adapted to deal with this toxic by-product and no doubt many species of algae died as the toxic oxygen built up in the atmosphere. But eventually, these algae evolved to protect themselves from the toxic oxygen and the levels continued to rise.

As the oxygen concentration rose, some strains of life evolved to depend on it as an energy source. It turns out that if there is enough free oxygen, it can be combined with other things in the environment, like the structural materials in the plentiful plants to provide an energy source, and so the first herbivores evolved. And once there were herbivores the carnivores could evolve.

Carboniferous Period

Along our journey we can recall the Carboniferous Period, from 360 to 290 MYBP [Million years before present] when the O2 and CO2 concentration was much higher than it is today. Now we have 21% O2 and 300ppm CO2. In the Carboniferous there was 32% O2 and 800ppm CO2. Talk about Global Warming! Actually the global temperature average was about the same as we have today. And certainly this was pre-industrial. The higher levels of oxygen allowed large insects, Meganeura, similar to a dragonfly, with wingspans as large as 75cm – about 2.5 feet.

Meganeurid

The take-away messages from this history are that

1. One specie’s pollution is another specie’s requirement, and
2. Life has evolved from a basis in exploitation to a sustainable ecology.
3. Life wasn’t always based on sustainability. For the first more than one billion years of it’s existence, life was exploitive, just as man is now.

In order for sustainability to evolve, life had to use up the easily exploited resources – the primordial Petro-chemical deposits of methane, ammonia and hydrogen – and evolve the means to depend on the cycle of photosynthesis employing the sun and CO2.

For a time, man has taken the easy way of exploiting the available resources, but like the plants before us, we need to learn to live sustainably.

Sustainability

Life has evolved to recycle everything completely. We have only to look at any verdant ecology on the planet – Coral Reefs, Rain Forests, Temperate Forests, Temperate Ocean ecosystems – and we see complete recycling in a complex web of life. We have studied these eco-systems for years and while we don’t understand all the details in each one of them, we do understand the large picture in all of them.

We have now made our own ecology too, an exploitive one, much like that of the early bacteria. This is not to compare us with bacteria, but only to remind us, as we know, that such exploitive ecosystems are fleeting in the history of life. The resources run out and the toxic bi-products build up, and if we continue on this path, not only we, but all the life around us must evolve to live with that toxicity. I’m not talking about the CO2 and Methane that may build up in the atmosphere. The bulk of the species on earth will not be adversely affected by a rise in CO2 to 380 or 500ppm. Life has been there before. Many plants will see this is as a food boon and there may be a verdant time after we have poisoned ourselves off the planet. When there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, photosynthesis is more efficient. In the grand scheme of things, the mass-extinction caused by the human condition will not even rank among the top 10 such events, tragic though it will be. But I’m sure that we don’t want to be among the extinct.

Let’s look at some of the resources that we use, and even now attempt to re-use and re-cycle [R&R]. Let us recall that Reduce does not figure into ecology. Life is greedy and uses all the resources available to it. However, everything is re-used and re-cycled. Some of the materials that human ecology uses are: Metals, Paper, Plastics, and Glass. You can add more to the list I’m sure. But our pathetic attempts to recycle these only recovers a small portion of our use of these materials and most recycle programs are a joke compared to what happens in any ecology that we have studied. R&R is very complex to get right. It has taken millions of years for these ecologies to evolve the complete recycling programs that they use. How quickly do we think we can duplicate this complexity for all the materials that we use?

These kinds of R&R can never put our civilization on a long term recycling path. It’s a land-fill reduction policy at best.

We can only hope to succeed with a long term R&R program if we hook into nature rather than imitating it. We must adopt mostly biological materials for our civilization rather than metal and glass materials to have any chance at true R&R. That way the complex evolved organisms of nature help us rather than our having to invent all the process ourselves.

If life on this planet had evolved incorporating metals and glass into the ecology, then the R&R for those materials would already be in place in nature, but they are not. Metals and stone and glass [Silicon Dioxides] were left out of nature’s processes. This probably tells us something about the chemistry surrounding those materials. It requires too much energy or there are no suitable chemical processes for those materials to be incorporated into a sustainable ecology. We should take this hint from nature, who has had billions of years of experience in this area, and adopt materials where the chemistry supports reasonable R&R processes. Unless you are a snail or a diatom, stone and silicates are not a part of your ecology.

The Message of Avatar the Movie

And now we come to a message I found in the movie Avatar. I’m not sure if James Cameron had this message in mind when he wrote the story, or whether it is an emergent message that he did not see or intend.

Pandora is an example of a sustainable civilization. In order to see this, you have to stop looking at the Na’vi as primitive people. Think of them rather as a highly evolved race of folks with a global internet – you’ve seen the movie, right. I’m not going to review or repeat the movie here. If you have not seen the movie, then go see it and come back to this.

Let’s look at what the Na’vi have:

1. Places to live. Large buildings where large numbers of people can live in close proximity. Ok they happen to look like trees. Really big trees.
2. Abundant food and water nearby. You can pick from Rainforest, Prarie or Oceanside tribes. Like we do now.
3. Vehicles of several types for transportation both on the ground and in the air. Presumably in the ocean too, although we didn’t actually see examples of this in the movie – or at least I didn’t see it.
4. A planet wide communication mechanism. Previous stories might have called this Gaia. Although the don’t seem to be using it as effectively as they might. They flew to the neighboring tribes rather than going to the nearest tree and doing a phone call. By the way, as I read the movie, no ancestors were lost when one of the life trees was destroyed. That was the tragic destruction of a local terminal, nothing more. The planet wide network backs up multiple copies of everything: a Carbonite subscription is built into the system.
5. Everything they have is self-replicating and self-repairing. Except their bows and arrows.

Let’s see what they don’t have:

1. Pollution of any kind. All of their needs are met with natural substances that are completely recycled by the surrounding ecology, whether that be rain forest or prairie.
2. Population problems. They have adapted their numbers to a sustainable level.
3. Political misunderstandings – in the absence of the Sky People at least. If you can’t understand your neighboring tribe because your local spoken language has evolved, just hook into the life tree with your neighbor and understanding will be enhanced by the Babelfish program that is present in the life-tree network.

DireHorse

Let’s look at other properties of what they have:

1. Their vehicles are smarter than ours. They can hook into their horses and birds to tell them where to go, but the horses and birds already come with many modern features that we are hopelessly trying to add to ours: Collision avoidance, unattended operation, automated driving in crowded traffic. When you start with an animal that flocks or herds and knows how to stand up and avoid running into another or a tree, then it’s much easier to build a vehicle that does these things. If you start with a piece of metal and a computer, perhaps it can be done, but it’s much harder.
2. It may be harder to learn to fly, or drive, than it is for us. But once you do, it is potentially much safer. And who can say that our teenagers should not go through a rite-of-passage than makes them appreciate the privilege of driving rather than viewing the car as a toy. Perhaps the Na’vi have a lower teenage vehicular death rate than we do. And if you do spend a late night out partying, it is useful if your car knows the way home by itself.
3. Who needs wide-screen-HD-tv when you can hook into the stories of the ancestors? And who is to say that story-tellers among the Na’vi cannot hook into their local life-tree and imagine their stories to be told, or recount their experiences, to be recorded for all after them to enjoy in full 3D with a complete sensory experience.

The Na’vi and the World of Pandora is not a primitive aboriginal past, but rather a picture of a possible and rich sustainable civilization that we can aspire to. Our present course of building a metal, glass and silicon ecology and then recreating sustainability is going to be much harder than adapting biology to our needs to accomplish the same ends.

Now all we need to do is to get this temporary Global Warming thing under control as we see what the real long term goal is for our civilization.

Unanswered Questions

There are many unanswered questions in the Avatar story. Rich material for sequels to be sure. Here are some of the questions that I have:

1. How did Pandora arise? Did it naturally evolve? or was it created by the previous un-sustainable, metal-glass-ecology civilization as they grew out of that primitive technology.
   Are the floating mountains the remnants of the previous toxic metal-glass ecology? Long derelict remnants of buildings in a floating city?
2. Are the Na’vi still in control of their own evolution in ways that we cannot understand? Can they create or modify the life forms around them, perhaps using the life tree as an intermediary? A larger Direhorse, an ocean crossing whale vehicle, a bird that can transport the aged or very young.
3. Do the Na’vi know and understand their origins. Apparently they do by listening to the life tree. They probably have a better connection with their past than we do, since all we have are history books and fossils.

Floating Mountains

- windy

Images Copyright by Twentieth Century Fox and others.
Text – Copyright (c) 2009, Darrell Duffy

You can find the plug-in here.

Fails in Firefox 3.0.12 and 3.5.2. Website reported as a failed site.

Using Max 2009 on Vista x86, SP1, I created and exported a simple scene with a knot, 3 lights and a camera.

Here is the scene on this website.

The model does not play in Firefox 3.0.13, either from the file system or from this website.

It does play in MS IE 8 both from the file system or from the website.

The samples on the hypercosm website play in both MSIE 8 and Firefox 3.

This is what the model should look like.

I’ve rebooted the system at least once after installing HyperCosm. It seems very odd that the plugin does not work in Firefox for my model, when it works perfectly well on the samples and works in MSIE 8.

- windy

It’s posted in the forum here.

Two fixes:

• Fix size of sphere and check size of rest of the shapes between max and SL. All seem ok.
• Enhance exporter for better error handling and saving multiple files to control maximum size of the output file. The file size is limited to about 64 primitives so that the 64K notecard limit is not exceeded. Files are labeled _1, _2 etc.

wwv

At last. Here is a version that might be worth trying.

I’ve tested it with a few objects, and as you can see, it works to a large extent:

The smoke test finally created 6 objects. And then I tried it with a larger set of objects.

Here is the larger test case in max.

And here they are in Second Life:

First Observations:

• Looks like native Max positioning and rotation work like a charm.
• There seems to be a disagreement about what “twist” means between the prims and SL.
• Everything else looks like it works in SL. At least that this panel tests.

Install and use with Max 6-9

• Copy all the files from the zip to max\scripts\startup and restart max.
• Find the SLPrim object under the creation panel pull-down under “Second Life”.
• To create a prim, select the SLPrim object and then click and drag in the viewport. Probably the top viewport is best. Right click to stop creating objects.
• Use the modifier panel to modify the objects as you would expect.
• Modifiers may be added, smooth and normals maybe interesting. See below in workarounds.
• You may save and reopen max files with SLPrims in them. As long as you have the SLPrim maxscript file in startup, these files should open and render the objects. If the maxscript file is missing, you will see errors about the objects.
• To export the primitives to a text file, in the utilities panel choose MaxScript and then Second Life Export from the pull-down.
• You may export all or only selected objects. All objects that are not SLPrims are ignored with no error.
• Import as with any other prims of these types. See the Second Life forums for instructions about finding the importer and using it.

Caveats:
There are some caveats for max however:

1. This was developed under max6 and tested with max7. It won’t work in max5 or earlier since it depends on a feature of being able to shorten an array by assigning array.count = value. Max5 and earlier do not support this.
2. Positioning, rotation, copying and instances should all work in max in the native manner with these primitives.
3. Do not use max scaling since the exporter takes no account of the scale of the object.
4. Set your custom units to meters before you start building any objects. That way the size in the panel for meters will be the same size as objects inside max.
5. You are free to use any other max objects in the scene that you like. But of course they are ignored when the objects are exported.
6. You should build your scene well above [0,0,0] since the importer object will build all objects relative to that point. The importer cube object ends up at [0,0,0] so any object there will cover it up.
7. I have not tested building objects that are farther than 10m in extent. The “point” dummy was sized to 20m[sic] to provide a 10m box as a guideline. The point object’s box is apparently 1/2 the size of the point itself.
8. If you have too many objects for a reasonable import, you can export selected. Grouping of SLPrims should work fine. I’ve not tested this yet, but the exporter should look through all grouping and linking to find the SLPrims to export them.
9. You are free to apply modifiers to the SLPrim objects. Of course any shape or texture modifiers won’t be exported. It may be interesting to apply smooth or normal modifiers to the objects since at this point they don’t work exactly as you expect.

Release Notes:
The prims mostly work at this stage, but there are a few known problems:

1. Sphere – with cut the second end does not render. See workaround (1).
2. Torus, ring, tube – inside flap is visible when you cut, and causes wrinkle in surface. See workaround (2).
3. Torus, ring, tube – one cut end is not smooth. See workaround (2).
4. Taper x,y – reversed for Torus,Ring,Tube. Gee is it like this in SL?? Or the original prims? Not sure.
5. Twist looks wrong based on testing with SL. Looks like a basic misunderstanding about what twist means. Might be a radians / degrees mismatch since max uses degrees and Blender uses radians. Twist is 0.0 to 1.0
6. Torus,ring,tube – profile cuts don’t render correctly in max. The cut faces are left out on one side of the cut.
7. SLPrims are very slow. 30 objects bogs down max quite a lot. This is surprising since once the objects are created, the script is not needed again. Meshes are created and are cached until any parameters are changed. I have built primitive objects in this way without noticing this issue. Investigation is required.
8. Entering or changing the “description” is very slow. Each character typed causes a repaint of the object. Not sure how to fix this. Cut and paste of all text at once might be a workaround.

Workarounds:

1. To render missing faces in the max viewports, force 2 sided in either of two ways: (a) Make a two sided material and apply to the primitive. (b) Configure the viewport to “Force 2 sided”.
2. To show a smoother primitive in the max viewports apply a smooth modifier, choose “auto smooth” and set the angle for the appropriate rendering. You may have to change the angle when cut or profile cut is changed.

Download SLPrims 0.9.26

Download Examples for Max7

I’ve created a Forum for discussion and download of SLPrims.

I hope you find this useful. Any feedback or comments are welcome in the forum.

Cheers,
Windyweather VanAlten

Progress so far is that the UI is pretty much done. Here are some pictures and if you’d like to download the script and try it, you are welcome to. At this point, it does not create any mesh, but the UI functions. Comments are welcome.

My current approach involves two scripts:

1. The primitive script will build meshes and allow manipulating the primitves in max. There will be rules of course. See below. But generally, as much of native max will be used as possible.
2. A utility script will sweep the scene and export all the SL primitives to a “tag file” in the same export format as the Blender Script.

Rules for use of the prmitives are at least:

• Create the primitives with the SLPrim object only. Only these objects will be exported to SL.
• Other objects in the scene will be ignored, so if you want to light and render the scene in max, you are free to do that.
• Movement and rotation are native in max. You must size the objects in the SLPrim ui, not using any scale or other modifiers.
• No modifiers are supported. It is to be determined whether they can be ignored.
• Texturing is undetermined at this time. Sure would be nice to support textures as they are in SL. Maybe using a special SL texturing plugin that knows how to apply the UVs in the same way as SL. Or add another rollout to the SLPrim.
• In order to support object positioning in max, it’s probably going to be required to set the world units in max to a specific settings in meters. Sure would be nice to have actual units displayed in max. This probably just falls out with a little work in the primitive.
• More???

Other problems include:

• Grouping. If a large collection in built in max, say a boat of house of a couple of hundred primitives, then grouping should be preserved from the Max environment into SL. The current tagged file format does not show this opportunity. Not sure how to implement this.
• Is the SL import script available? Or is it a built in function in SL? Might be nicer if it were a script so that it can be enhanced for texture coords and grouping. Where can we find the documentation for that function / script, or the source?
• More issues?

Here are the rollouts for the script at this stage:

To install the script, just copy all the files to your max\scripts\startup folder and restart max. Then look in the Second Life category of objects in the object creation drop-down. Click on SLPrim to see the UI. The script does not yet create a mesh. Comments are welcome.

SL Primitives MaxScript with UI only

Enjoy,
Windweather VanAlten

I got a Lego catalog in the mail yesterday. Well that’s what happens when you buy a nephew a Lego kit. You get catalogs forever. That’s ok. So I was looking through this catalog and saw mention of Lego Factory which is a program for your computer where you could build lego scenes and then order the bricks to make the scene. So since I’m a 3D artist, I decided to try it out…. Well Lego Designer is simple to use, but very frustrating. Here’s the creation that I built in about an hour messing around with it.

Lego Designer is very frustrating to use. I was spending many times over and over clicking and moving bricks because I could not get them to stick where I wanted. By way of constructive feedback, here are some issues with Lego Designer 1.6.680.

• The choice of views is very limited. Sure would be nice to just drag around in the window to change the view. Of course serious work needs a 4 up view that most CAD programs provide.
• The interface is dumbed down, presumably for children. Someone doesn’t seem to be keeping up with what children know about computers these days. They are more savvy than the rest of us, and will soon outgrow this limiting interface.
• The biggest problem is that the block positioning algorithm is very frustrating. I finally gave up on the program because I couldn’t efficiently build a large model with it.
• The Lego Factory website promised export to LDRAW format exporter, but I couldn’t find anyway to export anything. The format for Lego Designer is a binary format, in contrast to other Lego CAD programs that save TEXT formats that can easily be cross converted. So, in spite of the fact that I can order the bricks for a model using Lego Factory, I can’t import any of my very cool models built with Lego DRAW or LMCAD and then order them using Lego Designer. This seems odd since the folks using the other CAD program have built the largest models.

After my short, but frustrating, time with Lego Designer, the whole idea was intriguing and after some searching I found a much better tool. MLCAD. Here is a whole community called the LUG – or Lego Users Group
and there’s a section on CAD programs available for Legos. I haven’t checked them all out as yet, but I have spent a few enjoyable hours with MLCAD.

MLCAD is a serious CAD program for Legos. The bricks position and snap together easily. Although there is no legality checking, so you can position bricks inside each other or use invalid snap positions. There are some 500 brick types to choose from. The brick types come from the LDRAW website and so installing the programs involves some hand crafting.

As your scene becomes large, it is increasingly difficult to position bricks. But there is a nifty way around the problem: Sub-objects. By creating parts of the scene as “sub models” these become easier to assemble into larger scenes. And of course sub-models can incorporate other sub-models, so there is no limit. The performance is quite good as you can see by the size of my first project.

Here are the various sub-models that I built as part of my hotel.

The Lobby

Roof Ring

Atrium

Roof

Tower

I’ll post more of my Lego Models here as I develop them. You can download the model of the hotel here for LMCAD and work with it yourself. I sure it’s not that great a model, and there are probably some invalid or less optimal brick layouts, but it will give you an idea of what is quickly possible.

D

Legal Stuff
Lego® is a registered trademark of the Lego Group. LDraw, the LDraw file format, MLCad, and other software mentioned on this website are not official software titles published by the LEGO Group, they are developed by private, individual enthusiasts. For more information and discussion, please visit the LUGNET CAD discussion group.

Adding Dreamscape terrain and sky.

Adjust terrain.

Adding plants and clouds.

Backyard from above.

Backyard from a lower level.

Max model of the Lament Box. (141KB)

Movie of Animation. (8MB, DIVX required)

You can find it here. Along with a few tutorials that I have captured.

gmax and tutorials

These pages were complex enough that I decided not to rebuild them in WordPress but to leave them as they are and just link to them.

Import molecule files for Chemistry or just for fun. Both PDB [Protein Database] and MOL format files are supported. This script works in both max and gmax.
The MDL Chime browser plug-in displays molecule files in the browser.
The VMD program displays molecules and supports a large number of rendering options.

However, while these programs incorporate a knowledge of chemistry, neither of these programs provides fine control over rendering and animation. The Import Molecule max script imports the molecule files and creates max geometry that can be rendered and animated at will.

Materials are created for each atom type. The atoms and bonds are grouped for each molecule and the name of the group is based on the name of the molecule. A material is created for each type of atom and the color is set according to the CPK standard. The materials can be changed in any way desired later on.

Unlike other rendering options, max allows far more options for rendering. Note the shadows and bump texture in the above picture and the lighting and rendering effects below. Of course all the animation capabilities of max are also available.

Rendering Options

Balls, Balls and sticks and sticks alone are supported.

Some molecule files don’t contain the right number of bonds. Note the molecule in the background above that the bonds don’t connect the atoms. This can be corrected by choosing the option for Sticks Both Ways as in the foreground.

Installation and Use

Copy the script to 3dsmax4\scripts\startup and copy the importMolColorTable.txt file to 3dsmax4\scripts.

In the Utilities panel click MaxScript and then choose Import Molecule from the pulldown.

Choose the display type.

Choose the size and complexity of the parts. Careful about choosing too many segments or too many sides if there are a large number of atoms.

Set the scale of the atom. Atoms are by default only 1.0 unit in radius. 100 is a good scale for typical max work, but the choice will depend on the size of the molecule in the scene you are designing.

Click on Import molecule and choose either a MOL or PDB file.

Lighting and Rendering Effects

All the power of max can be used to render your molecules once you import them into max.

You can find this and other scripts at TurboSquid

Railings are not provided, but games usually do not require railings.

Optional Curtains are provided with the linear stairs to fill between the treads and the floor.

As you can see, submaterial ids are set for the various surfaces of the stair objects.

Stair Rollouts

Linear Stairs

Spiral Stairs

Circular Stairs

See TurboSquid
for these scripts.

Here are some examples of arch objects with textures and rendered with 3d studio max.

Gothic Arch

Roman Arch

Including Transepts

Transepts are the crossing points of the arches that makeup the roof of a cathedral. The transept plug-in allows building cathedrals as well as other corridors and hallways.

Plug-In Rollouts

Arch Rollout

Arch Door Rollout

Arch Transept Rollout

The plug-ins provide planar mapping coords, although you are likely to want to use a mapping modifier to provide customized mapping. Submaterial ids are assigned to the various parts of the objects, as you can see from the examples.

All of the scripts are available on Turbosquid.

Follow this to an old page with some links and a very touching little movie.

Machinima

This animation uses Follow Path, and LookAt to have the red cone follow the path while looking at the central sphere. The path has been duplicated and then rendered as a mesh so that it is visible. Also a second cone was linked to the first cone so that its orientation can be seen as it follows the path.

The moving rods and pistons show another use of LookAt. The horizontal rods are animated to move back and forth. The balls and pistons [just nested cyllinders] are linked to follow the rods. The wide part of the piston is looking at the the ball, and the inner piston is looking at the outer piston. In max, both sets of pistons behave the same, but in RTRE, the red piston fails to behave correctly. Note that it is not possible to have two objects look at each other, so another object, the ball, is required to complete the circuit.

To fix the blue piston in RTRE, it is quite simple. One merely has to add some dummy keyframes to cause RTRE to pickup the animation of the objects as they are transformed by max. To do this, add a position keyframe to the first and last frame. The look at constraints are rotational constraints, so this does not conflict with a position key. But the position keys cause RTRE to pickup the entire transform for the object, including the rotation, so the look at constraint is correctly animated by RTRE.

Download the FollowPath Scene

This animation uses a rotation script for the gears like this:

( eulerAngles 0 0 (360*currenttime/100) ) as quat

This can be customized by either changing the 360 to a larger number of degrees to speed up the animation, or by changing the 100 to match the number of frames in the animation. Balls are linked to the gears so that their rotation can be more easily followed. The gears were created by the Geodesic program available on this site.

Download Rotating Gears

Download Dungeon Map 7

The poolstalk scene combines animation with sound and camera capture.
There are two ways to get up to the pool. Walk through the spinning disk of the teleport module and you will be transported to the pool side. Or take the elevator. To use the elevator, navigate near the elevator and then click the green button. If the elevator is not waiting for you , click the red button to bring it down.

Download PoolStalk

To use one of these scenes, download the zip file, by clicking on the picture, then unzip it and run it. You will need a reasonably powerful PC, Windows 2000 or better, and a pretty good video card. However, these scenes will work on a 1.3GHz laptop with Intel integrated graphics. It is best to have nVidia or ATI graphics.

To navigate through the scenes use the arrow keys to move around, and the page UP and DOWN buttons to move up and down. DELETE and END move back and forth. There is no gravity, unlike the other scene explorers such as Walkabout and Quest3D.

You can find examples of RTRE scenes in other posts in this category.

RTRE is now maintained and updated by TurboSquid as a certified plug-in for max.

RTRE was designed originally as a visualization tool for architectural projects. Unfortunately it has not been enhanced over the last few years to include new features in the new graphics cards.

Limitations
RTRE has some significant limitations:

1. No Gravity. So you can’t walk down stairs for example.
2. No transparent moving textures. So flames can’t be done realistically.
3. No animated UVmaps. So special effects using moving textures aren’t possible.
4. No animated meshes. It’s not possible to have animated people or animals without animated meshes.
5. No particle support. Not even for small numbers of mesh based particles.

Some obvious enhancements would take better advantage of new graphics
cards.

1. Bump mapping using either standard bump maps, or
   pixel normal maps [DDS files].
2. Vertex displacement maps. Maybe using DDS files. Aren’t they used
   for that too?