Armillary Sphere

[simsmj]

Egg, I have two animations for you, both are largeish, 253K, and 269K. The first one shows the armillary sphere in flatpack form, morphing into the fully formed sphere, and the next post should have the fully formed sphere swinging gently around to help view the 3D relationships of its parts.

Mike

http://www.xaracen.pwp.blueyonder.co...ropped%202.gif

[simsmj]

And this is the second animation.

Mike

http://www.xaracen.pwp.blueyonder.co...20anim%202.gif

[John Rayner]

Very Cool Mike.. Looks even better to me.

Can you put that in the library next the the large globe? http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/wink.gif http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

[Ron Duke]

Fantastic! Don't know how you do it, Mike.
ron

[Soquili]

Excellent, Mike. You make Xara3D do so much.

[Egg Bramhill]

Fantastic.
I just love that flat-pack ani. That would be almost imposibble to create in a full 3D prog.
How did you get that extremely thin axis bar for the central globe?
Egg

[John Rayner]

Hi Mike,

you should do so car part animations. Could make you a pretty penny, showing how to pull a carb off a car for instance.... http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/wink.gif http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

[simsmj]

Egg, thanks again, and the extra thin rod is a single dot, extruded in the z-direction (as all extrusions are). X3D makes all shapes a minimum of 1 unit thick in the z-direction, but imposes no such restriction in the x/y directions. The end caps are a square cornered1 bevel on the thin rod. The dot is re-used for the blue globe, too. You can see in the flatpack anim that at the beginning, the rod sticks out well beyond the rest of the flat shapes, then slowly rotates into position. The full-swing anim is like a dance but it is more than 2 Megabytes in size, at 256 frames and smooth at 16 frames/Sec. I chopped off the last three-quarters of the cycle then took out every second frame to get it down to a postable size, as well as cropping off the dross, and with using Swing animations to get the shapes in their correct orientations, there is a lot of dross all over the place!

Bill, John, Ron, more thanks!! I'll not get my head out the door http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

Mike

PS John, I'm not so sure about carbs, but I think I've got pistons down to a fine art http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[fencepost]

Originally posted by Mike Sims:
This is the import problem I had when I started creating the surface details. The left hand image is the XaraX shape, the right hand is the same shape imported to Xara3D. Not a pretty sight! It looks like X3d fed it through a mangle then tried to re-assemble it again. I can tell you I was not a happy bunny when I saw it.

Mike

http://www.xaracen.pwp.blueyonder.co...%20problem.png

Great work as always, Mike! You're incredible. As far as the problem you mentioned, I don't know if this is a possible solution or not, but some of the fonts I use get "mangled" in a similar fashion by X3D when the bevel setting is on "miter." I've found that changing it to "round" often does the trick.

Of course, this works in the simple world I live in. I'm sure in the world of the "xara gods" things are much different http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Art

[simsmj]

Hi, Art
Thanks for your suggestion, I tried it, but it made no noticeable difference. However, in the process, I discovered that if I import the ring by itself, without adding the two sizing dots, then it comes through almost intact, and if I add just one dot, it is still mostly OK on import, but adding the second dot brings on the manglies with a vengeance. It doesn't seem to matter which way round I add the dots, one or other first then the second, or both together, the end result looks OK in XaraX, but disastrous in X3D.

If I knew what the fundamental reason for it was, it might be possible to pre-treat the XaraX shape in some way before importing it to X3D. If someone at Xara reads this and has an answer or suggestion, I'm listening!

Mike