Armillary II

[simsmj]

I've been spending some time cleaning up various problems I had with the original sphere. It had been plagued with artifacts, and it was also too small to see any real detail, so I've more or less rebuilt it, this time without the stand, which allowed for a relative size increase. Lighting makes an enormous amount of difference in impact, and tweaking the lights took a lot of time to get good results.

The image attached is now taking pride of place centred on my desktop!

Mike

[Soquili]

Wow!! Mike you achieve more in Xara3D than some people can with the high end 3D programs.

[Egg Bramhill]

Mike,

Awesome. You must have the patience of a saint.

Egg

[John Rayner]

If you could create a complete animation, that would make a create screen saver...

[Grafixman]

You are the God of X3D!
What everyone said. (Except John, he'll push you off the cliff if you let him .... )
They should use that pic in the package of X3D... but Xara would probably receive a lot of complaints from people trying to do the same thing and failing miserably....

[Terry]

Mike,

I've run out of superlatives! If I call this one unbelievably fabulous, what will I do when you make the next series of improvements?

Mumble something about my inadequacies and slink away, I suppose...

[simsmj]

Thanks, folks.
John, I thought I'd try outputting a screen saver, but that means it would have to be the Swing animation, having the shapes swing into position from the starting point of the initial flatpack. Unfortunately, the process of making this image causes a lot of clutter as a side effect, so I would need to crop the resulting animation/scr, and remove some frames, too. Can you edit a screensaver? If so what with? I recollect you saying something that .scr's are basically .avi format, but I have no experience in playing with these. Suggestions?

Mike

PS My wife wants me to add that it is her patience that is saint-like, my patience is easy, due to alleged borderline Aspberger's Syndrome! And she's a very nice person, too, she said. :-) And of course I agree!

[a4hire]

Great picture Mike, I can't imagine making this in X3d. Do you have the newest verson? Maybe I should go for the upgrade.

[Grafixman]

If you have a video editing program, maybe you could create two separate animations and composite them somehow.... not sure if video editors can save files as screen savers, though. And you'd have to output your animations with alpha transparency to be able to composite them as a single superimposed object....

[John Rayner]

I played around with adobe premiere tonight, testing it with screensavers... Nogo... .scr are simular, but not the same. can not edit a .scr with a video editor. Xara has screenmaker that deals with screensavers, but it is an entry level product and not an editor. I guess you will have to do a google search for a .scr editor.

On the other hand, if you want to do an .avi then that can be done pretty easily. Video uses a blue/green screen for the transparent background. Although the newer high end editor will use a transparent .png.

sorry I can not help you more. I know X3D6 can output a screensaver, but there is alot of ancillary trash in the file that you need to edit out... So you need a .scr editor.

Here are about 300 editors to choose from at downloads.com.